Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    My Country: A Syrian Memoir
    Unavailable
    My Country: A Syrian Memoir
    Unavailable
    My Country: A Syrian Memoir
    Ebook206 pages4 hours

    My Country: A Syrian Memoir

    By Kassem Eid and Janine di Giovanni

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    _______________

    'Powerful … A humbling and important first-hand account of a brutal civil war in which as many as 500,000 people have died' - Guardian

    'A memoir of resistance and survival unique in the annals of modern war … If the shedding of blood can be beautiful in words, he makes it so'     - Wall Street Journal

    'A valuable perspective absent from much of what has already been written on Syria ... An epic view of what Syria was and has become' - Arab Weekly
    _______________

    Born to Palestinian refugees, Kassem Eid grew up in the small town of Moadamiya on the outskirts of the ancient city of Damascus, playing in streets perfumed with jasmine. But it didn't take long for Kassem to realise that he was treated differently at school because of his family's resistance to the brutal government regime. When Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000, hopes that things might change for the better were swiftly crushed. When the 2011 Arab Spring protests in Syria were met with extreme violence, it was yet another blow – and as Kassem reached young adulthood, the country spiralled into civil war.

    Then, on 21 August 2013, Kassem nearly died in a sarin gas attack that killed hundreds of civilians. Later that day, he would pick up a gun for the first time, to join the Free Syrian Army as they fought government forces. For Kassem, this marked the moment that he and his country changed forever - even as the rest of the world turned its face away.
    _______________

    'A remarkably unified picture of the realities of life since 1970 in the Syria of the Assads … shows, unambiguously, precisely what the Assad government seeks to conceal' - Times Literary Supplement

    'A touching tale, this humanises the story of war when often all we want to do is look away' - Metro, The best new books by BME authors you'll be reading this year

    'Eid's story is one of hope giving way to fear and finally betrayal, a narrative of one of this century's darkest episodes, a necessary perspective, made more prescient because it is personal' - The National

    'Gripping, hauntingly raw, and a testament to his resilience' - The Intercept

    'Powerful … Tightly-focused … A first-person, eyewitness account written with alternating love and fury' - Prospect
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateMay 14, 2018
    ISBN9781408895115
    Unavailable
    My Country: A Syrian Memoir

    Related to My Country

    Related ebooks

    Politics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Betrayed Again

      Jun 18, 2020

      Betrayed Again
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Silencing Of A Princess

      Mar 12, 2021

      The Silencing Of A Princess
      4 min read

    • Article

      Welcome To Britain. Now What?

      Apr 1, 2022

      Welcome To Britain. Now What?
      17 min read

    • Article

      The Cleric and I

      Apr 10, 2018

      The Cleric and I
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Living Days

      Nov 4, 2019

      The Living Days
      9 min read

    • Article

      Memory Highway

      May 17, 2021

      Memory Highway
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Lonely Grave

      May 8, 2018

      Reuben Louis Goldberg—Rube Goldberg as the world knew him—did it all: He was an engineer, cartoonist, sculptor, author, inventor, and—for just a very brief time in 1919—a war correspondent. Born in San Francisco on July 4, 1883, Goldberg as a child w

      5 min read

    • Article

      Memory Highway

      May 17, 2021

      Memory Highway
      5 min read

    • Article

      Alan Gratz's Novel 'Refugee' Demands Your Humanity

      Sep 3, 2017

      " 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?' "He will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.' " -- Matthe

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Shobha Rao

      Dec 4, 2018

      My reading choices this year were far more focused than they have ever been—rage has a way of focusing you, as does getting the Grace Paley Teaching Fellowship at The New School. I spent most of the year reading in preparation for my course, “Traditi

      2 min read

    • Article

      Our Sister Killjoy

      Nov 6, 2023

      Our Sister Killjoy
      4 min read

    • Article

      Psalm 139

      May 13, 2022

      Are you content to engage in that most vile sin of this age—privileged disengagement—because the unprovoked atrocities being committed in Ukraine by Russians are too much to deal with? Then we are on different teams. The post Psalm 139 appeared first

      7 min read

    • Article

      ‘Cairo Circles’: Featured Fiction from Doma Mahmoud

      Oct 25, 2021

      An excerpt from a debut novel that Booklist calls "enthralling" and Kirkus hailed as "an ambitious literary debut." The post ‘Cairo Circles’: Featured Fiction from Doma Mahmoud appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for My Country

    4/5

    9 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Kassem Eid grew up in the jasmine streets of Moadamiya, a small town on the outskirts of the ancient city of Damascus. He was not a native Syrian, but his parents were Palestinian refugees who had made this country their home. He was bright and was really looking forward to school, but on his first day, he realised that he was never going to be fully accepted because of his origins. He had already taught himself to read using the Readers Digest that his father had, and was really looking forward to school, but just how much of an outsider he was dawned on him when he first went to school.

      In 2000 Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father as the leader of Syria. There was a glimmer of hope in the country that he would be a little more tolerant than his father. These were dashed fairly quickly when he gripped the country with an even fiercer tyrannical government. Eleven years later revolution swept across the region with the Arab spring. Each country reacted differently to the uprisings, but Syria crushed any protest with arrests and violence. There was only one way that this was going to go and as Kassem reached his mid-teens, the country was spiralling into civil war. The regime was prepared to use any means to keep the parts of the country suppressed, including chemical warfare, and on one day in August, Moadamiya, where he lived, was attacked with Sarin gas. He saw many people die that day in the horrible way that the poison works, but he survived.

      That was the day that he joined the Free Syrian Army; that was the day he first picked up a gun.

      This is a book that demands to be read. The situation in Syria has now reached crisis point especially with the recent military action that the UK was involved with. The people of Syria have suffered enough at the hands of the brutal dictatorship; all these people want to do is live in peace in their own country. Sadly though they are a pawn in the battle between the USA and Russia and until that is resolved, people die. Eid's book about his life spent there tells the story of the brutality suffered by him and other under the authorities is heart-wrenching stuff. With his background, he was always going to be an outsider whichever country he lived in, but he still has the right to choose that country and be able to make the choice to stay in Syria.

      If you have a single shred of humanity in you, then you need to read this book.