One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is for anyone who’s at a loss for where to start with war in the Middle East. For anyone who worries climate crisis is all too complicated. For anyone who struggles to understand their kids, their strident friends, their demonstrating co-workers. And it’s also for them. The indignant. The angry. The weary. Those people hesitant at crossroads. The inside cover overflows with praise. It is deserved.
With the acuity of a journalist, and the elegance of a renowned novelist, El Akkad captures the hollowness at the heart of our ways of talking about our world in crisis, and diagnoses what ails us. El Akkad details the engine of dishonesty that makes it possible to look away from genocide, unnecessary poverty, climate catastrophe. He parses for us the comforting fiction of freedom fighters, of the noble resistants that the West lauds, but only well after their struggles have ended; in the present tense and thick of fighting they are styled terrorists. He peers closely at fear, and makes of it a thing we can and must speak of.
El Akkad’s writing is mesmerising: it juggles the lyrical with the political, the comic with the analytical, and never once drops a ball. His book is at once observation, admonition and tender autobiography. Near its end El Akkad writes, ‘I don’t know how to make a person care for someone other than their own. Some days I can’t even do it myself.’ And yet, he has tried, and has engagingly succeeded.
Reviewed by Wendy Waring
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States.
He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages.
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