Journalist Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, will speak at Wake Forest on his work and its relevance after October 7.
 

A Day in the Life is a micro-study of a single day in East Jerusalem, as Abed Salama is forced to negotiate both the complex entanglements of the Israeli Occupied West Bank and the various Palestinian political factions that vie for control over the region, all in an effort to locate his son who was the victim of a tragic bus accident. Thrall’s book has been widely reviewed, including in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, and the Washington Post. Arundhati Roy has said of the work: “Nathan Thrall’s book made me walk a lot. I found myself pacing around between chapters, paragraphs and sometimes even sentences just in order to be able to absorb the brutality, the pathos, the steely tenderness, and the sheer spectacle of the cunning and complex ways in which a state can hammer down a people and yet earn the applause and adulation of the civilized world for its actions.” Adam Hochschild praises it with: “It is hard to think of another book that gives such a poignant, deeply human face to the ongoing tragedy of Palestine. Thrall’s evocation of both a terrible crisis and the daily humiliations of life under occupation is nothing short of heartbreaking.”