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What does it mean to live against a wall? Travel to the world’s most disputed edges to meet the people who live alongside the razor wire, concrete, and steel and how the structure of the walls has influenced their lives. In this ambitious first person narrative, Marcello Di Cintio shares tea with Saharan refugees on the wrong side of Morocco’s desert wall. He meets with illegal Punjabi migrants who have circumvented the fencing around the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. He visits fenced-in villages in northeast India, walks Arizona’s migrant trails, and travels to Palestinian villages to witness the protests against Israel’s security barrier. From Native American reservations on the U.S.-M...
Marcello Di Cintio prepares for his “journey into the heart of Iran” with the utmost diligence. He takes lessons in Farsi, researches Persian poetry and sharpens his wrestling skills by returning to the mat after a gap of some years. Knowing that there is a special relationship between heroic poetry and the various styles of traditional Persian wrestling, he sets out to discover how Iranians “reconcile creativity with combat.” From the moment of his arrival in Tehran, the author is overwhelmed by hospitality. He immerses himself in male company in tea houses, conversing while smoking the qalyun or water pipe. Iranian men are only too willing to talk, especially about politics. Confus...
This is a travelogue of a different order: the searing beauty and somber reality of West Africa are distilled into poetic moments of refreshingly honest insight, a world transformed through the wide eyes of a new traveler.
Marcello Di Cintio first visited Palestine in 1999. Like most outsiders, the Palestinian narrative that he knew had been simplified by a seemingly unending struggle, a near-Sisyphean curse of stories of oppression, exile, and occupation told over and over again. In Pay No Heed to the Rockets, he reveals a more complex story, the Palestinian experience as seen through the lens of authors, books, and literature. Using the form of a political-literary travelogue, he explores what literature means to modern Palestinians and how Palestinians make sense of the conflict between a rich imaginative life and the daily tedium and violence of survival. Di Cintio begins his journey on the Allenby Bridge ...
For political readers and anyone invested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Marcello Di Cintio's Song of the Caged Bird is a refreshing look at Palestinian resistance--through literature and the power of books. When Marcello Di Cintio began teaching at the Palestine Writing Workshop in Ramallah, he avoided making reference to the occupation in his assignments at first--to see if his students addressed it on their own--and he soon learned that it touches all aspects of Palestinian life. Curious how Palestinian literature could operate with its people so tied to a single narrative, Di Cintio began a journey through the Palestinian world of books: from the monument to the poet Mahmoud Darwish to the volumes in the Nablus Prisoners' library; from one of the West Bank's most successful bookshops to a century-old library in Jerusalem run by a family with a lineage in that city many centuries older. What he found is a world of identity and resistance that is considerably more complex--and potentially more hopeful--than what we see splashed across our screens.
Borderwall as public space / Teddy Cruz -- Ronald Rael -- Pilgrims at the wall / Marcello Di Cintio -- Borderwall as architecture / Ronald rael -- Transborderisms / Norma Iglesias-Prieto -- Recuerdos / Ronald Rael -- Why walls don't work / Michael Dear -- Afterwards / Ronald Rael
For seventy years Israel has existed as a state, and for forty years it has honored a peace treaty with Egypt that is widely viewed as a triumph of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East. Yet the Palestinians - the would-be beneficiaries of a vision for a comprehensive regional settlement that led to the Camp David Accords in 1978 - remain stateless to this day. How and why Palestinian statelessness persists are the central questions of Seth Anziska's groundbreaking book, which explores the complex legacy of the agreement brokered by President Jimmy Carter. Based on newly declassified international sources, Preventing Palestine charts the emergence of the Middle East peace process, including the ...
The Canadian first lady of Iceland pens a book about why this tiny nation is leading the charge in gender equality, in the vein of The Moment of Lift. Iceland is the best place on earth to be a woman—but why? For the past twelve years, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report has ranked Iceland number one on its list of countries closing the gap in equality between men and women. What is it about Iceland that enables its society to make such meaningful progress in this ongoing battle, from electing the world’s first female president to passing legislation specifically designed to help even the playing field at work and at home? The answer is found in the country’s sprakkar...
A razor-sharp portrait of a morally bankrupt and gleefully wicked modern man, Worst. Person. Ever. is Douglas Coupland's gloriously filthy, side-splittingly funny and unforgettable novel. Meet Raymond Gunt. A decent chap who tries to do the right thing. Or, to put it another way, the worst person ever: a foul-mouthed, misanthropic cameraman, trailing creditors, ex-wives and unhappy homeless people in his wake. Men dislike him, women flee from him. Worst. Person. Ever. is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value. Gunt, in the words of the author, "is a living, walking, talking, hot steaming pile of pure id." He's a B-unit cameraman who ente...
In conversations with drivers ranging from refugees to American expats, Di Cintio explores the borderland of the North American taxi.