Publisher's Synopsis
THE LAST EARTH is a non-fictional narrative of modern Palestinian history. It is a unique people's history in both senses--an account of how major historic events in Palestine and the greater Middle East impacted ordinary people, as well as how that mass of people, in their tenacity, and even in their dispossession, represent a force that determines history. As such, it challenges both academic and popular takes on the tragic and criminal events that comprise Palestinian history. In a work at once beautiful and harrowing, Baroud has masterfully weaved the dimensions of intergenerational time, as it stretches from before the Nakba (the Palestinian castastrophe that marked the brutal birth of the Israeli State) to the destruction of the Palestinian Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria, to the flight from destroyed Yarmouk to Europe. Its nine chapters contain complex characters whose stories overlap, creating echo after resounding echo of their profound collective experience. Each chapter, read individually, is like an icon for the experience of an entire generation. When read as a whole, the book tells the story of a people whose history cannot be reduced to a historical timeline of conflict, but rather is embroidered and torn with complex human emotions, hopes, dreams, struggles and priorities that seem to pay no heed to politics, the military balance or ideological rivalries.
