Customer Reviews

A Thousand Farewells: A Reporter's Journey from Refugee Camp to the Arab Spring

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If ever you might consider an individual both called by destiny and responding in Freedom to that call..Nahlah Ayed would be such a one. Her ability to both be a witness and a participant in the events in her life and the life of the Middle East is both objective and passionate. She has the gift of piercing through the veils of a situation and revealing the human heart of the matter..with tremendous clarity..thus able in a way to see things as they are with empathy..judging yet non-judgemental. Her writing has both the conciseness of the seasoned reporter under time restrictions having to cut to the chase without trivialising an event or a life. Yet her writing is not dry but leads you in deeply to the story..and as she says "the people are the story". I thank her for the writing of this book. Her insights and experiences are a gift to anyone trying to make understand more both the refugee, the weight of history, and the longing for emancipation.

Nahlah Ayed is a Canadian, of Palestinian ethnicity. She begins the book with her early, comfortable life in Canada and then details her traumatizing move to a refugee camp in Jordan when she was a child. Her family lived in Jordan for seven long unhappy years before they returned to the security and safety of Canada. Nahlah became a TV journalist. With her fluency in Arabic, it was natural for her to cover the Middle East. She recalls various conflicts she saw, in which she was sometimes an accidental participant, with the cool eye of the professional. With her unusual background and understanding, she writes not just of the problems and overall disfunction of the region, be it Beirut or Baghdad, but captures the age old sadness. The dictators and autocratic monarchs have kept the people enslaved and finally, in the age of social media, they are beginning to rebel. A great read.

A well-written, honest description of the key issues in the Middle East, and of the difficulties journalists face in covering the region. Ayed is a fine reporter, and as her book shows, a conscientious, decent human being. I've reported from the region myself, and her work is bang-on. Shukraan, Nahlah.

Her honsety about her early life- about being taken back to Jordan having already settled in Canada makes this a moving story. I do have some issues with her "jumping" around and wondering what happened just prior to the events being described.

I plan to give this book to my husband as a present for our upcoming wedding anniversary. It arrived safely wrapped in a timely fashion.