Summary
Extending back to the first demonstrations of 2011, No Turning Back dissects the tangle of ideologies and allegiances that make up the Syrian conflict. As protests ignited in Daraa, some citizens were brimming with a sense of possibility. A privileged young man named Suleiman posted videos of the protests online, full of hope for justice and democracy. A father of two named Mohammad, secretly radicalized and newly released from prison, saw a darker opportunity in the unrest. When violence broke out in Homs, a poet named Abu Azzam became an unlikely commander in a Free Syrian Army militia. The regime's brutal response disrupted a family in Idlib province, where a nine-year-old girl opened the door to a military raid that caused her father to flee. As the bombings increased and roads grew more dangerous, these people's lives intertwined in unexpected ways.
Rania Abouzeid brings readers deep inside Assad's prisons, to covert meetings where foreign states and organizations manipulated the rebels, and to the highest levels of Islamic militancy and the formation of ISIS. Based on more than five years of clandestine reporting on the front lines, No Turning Back is an utterly engrossing human drama full of vivid, indelible characters that shows how hope can flourish even amid one of the twenty-first century's greatest humanitarian disasters.
Author Notes
Rania Abouzeid has won the Michael Kelly Award and George Polk Award for foreign reporting, among many other prizes for international journalism. She has written for The New Yorker, Time, Foreign Affairs, Politico, the Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times. A former New America fellow, she lives in Beirut, Lebanon.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Foreign correspondent Abouzeid spins finely detailed and informed narratives of how life in Bashar al-Assad's Syria descended into street protests and the bloody ongoing chaos of the "civilian revolution." Abouzeid explores the revolt, primarily through the stories of young men who take on the regime, including Suleiman, a wealthy middle manager turned activist; Mohammad, a father imprisoned for suspected Islamist ties and subjected to grisly tortures; and the pseudonymous Abu Azzam, a literature student turned rebel fighter. She also conveys the plight of noncombatants, such as one young girl, Ruha, and her family, who escape to Turkey to become "business-class refugees," out of immediate danger but enduring the hardships of a foreign country while trying to aid those in their hometown across the border. The author skillfully sets forth the complex political and military rivalries between those supporting and opposing the regime, discussing their backers from Saudi Arabia and Qatar as well as the foreign and homegrown fighters who became ISIS. In notes at the beginning and end, Abouzeid details her intense and perilous reporting process. She was banned from the country, she explains, soon after protests began, but nevertheless spent roughly three weeks a month clandestinely entering Syria for the next several years. Her grueling reportage is a formidable accomplishment. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Harrowing reporting from the front lines of the civil war in Syria.As Beirut-based freelance journalist Abouzeid, who has won the George Polk Award, writes in her opening pages, the Syrian government declared her an enemy and a spy fairly early in the popular uprising, forcing her not just to enter the country illegally, but also to focus on the opposition. That the book does not give equivalency, false or otherwise, to the government's side of the story does not diminish its objectivity or value. The author brings us the stories of people who, though capable of speaking for themselves, are not often heard from and might as well be voiceless insofar as audiences outside the country are concerned. By Abouzeid's account, all is chaos and ruin: so many people have died in the civil war in Syria that the U.N. long ago gave up trying to count them. The author is a reliable guide to the ethnic and religious intricacies of the struggle; one of the figures she interviews, while no friend of the regime, is an Alawite, like the ruling family, and therefore is reckoned to be one of them. That does not make him a friend of the opposition, not necessarily. Just so, some of the people Abouzeid profiles are members of militias allied with the Islamic State group and al-Qaida; many of the players involved answer in the affirmative to the question, "do you want the Quran to be the constitution in a future state?" Says one thoughtful rebel who figures prominently in the account, "We want an Islamic state, too, but only after we've liberated Syria and start liberating Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan can we establish a caliphate." Readers without familiarity with the many strains of opposition to the Assad regime are likely to emerge from this book a touch less confusedthough without much cause for hope, either.An eye-opening account of those who "played a pivotal role in the revolution's trajectory." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* By the end of 2017, estimates of deaths from the ongoing civil war in Syria ranged as high as 500,000. The conflict has drawn in, to varying degrees, the U.S., Iran, Russia, Lebanon, Turkey, and thousands of religiously motivated volunteers. Abouzeid, an award-winning journalist based in Lebanon, has provided a masterful, intense, and often personalized account of this seemingly endless conflict. Early on, the Syrian government branded Abouzeid as a spy, so much of her reporting has been clandestine, and it is necessarily focused upon the rebel side and rebel-held areas. Still, she strives for fairness and honesty. Some rebel partisans see a democratic, pluralistic future for Syria. Others speak in frighteningly narrow religious terms and long for a caliphate that includes the liberated surrounding states. The most eloquent and heartrending portions of Abouzeid's narrative concern civilians who are embroiled in the carnage directly and simply long for its end. This isn't a hopeful story, and the solution may come only through the exhaustion of both sides. This account could have benefited from a presentation of views from the government side, but Abouzeid's altogether intimate, revealing, and moving accomplishment is essential to any attempt to understand this tragedy.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE FEMALE PERSUASION, by Meg Wolitzer. (Riverhead, $28.) Of all the political threads that permeate Wolitzer's 12th novel, the most interesting is the challenge of intergenerational feminism. But Wolitzer is an infinitely capable creator of human identities as real as the type on this page; people are her politics. AETHERIAL WORLDS: Stories, by Tatyana Tolstaya. Translated by Anya Migdal. (Knopf, $25.95.) Tolstaya's remarkable short stories are all about people haunted by their flashing glimpses of shadow worlds - moments when the dull plastic coating of reality peels back to reveal something vastly more precious underneath. RUSSIAN ROULETTE: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn. (Twelve, $30.) Two veterans of Washington political journalism provide a thorough and riveting account of the 2016 election that casts an unfavorable light on both the Democratic and Republican campaigns. This is a book without heroes. GUN LOVE, by Jennifer Clement. (Hogarth, $25.) Clement's novel, her second about the gun trade, unfolds at a Florida trailer park where firearms and people intimately coexist. The imagery is dreamlike, as if to suggest the self-delusion of the novel's real-life counterparts. EDUCATED, by Tara Westover. (Random House, $28.) This harrowing memoir recounts the author's upbringing in a survivalist Idaho family cursed by ideological mania and outlandish physical trauma, as well as her ultimately successful quest to obtain the education denied her as a child. TANGERINE, by Christine Mangan. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.99.) In this sinister, sun-drenched thriller, set in the 1950s and rife with echoes of Patricia Highsmith, two college friends - involved in something dark and traumatic during their time at Bennington - get caught up in an even more lurid story when they meet, a year or two later, in Tangiers. NO TURNING BACK: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria, by Rania Abouzeid. (Norton, $26.95.) This narrative of the Syrian war from 2011 through 2016 offers page after page of extraordinary reporting and exquisite prose, rendering its individual subjects with tremendous intimacy. HELLO LIGHTHOUSE, by Sophie Blackall. (Little, Brown, $18.99; ages 4 to 8.) Blackall's illustrated journey through the history of one lighthouse captures themes of steadfastness and change, distance and attachment, and the beauty and tumult of nature. THEY SAY BLUE, by Jillian Tamaki. (Abrams, $17.99; ages 4 to 8.) This gorgeous debut picture book from a cartoonist and graphic novelist gets inside the mind of a thoughtful girl who contemplates colors, seasons and time as she questions her world. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Library Journal Review
In her debut book, Polk Award-winning journalist Abouzeid weaves narratives of very different individuals, along with their families and loved ones, involved in the Syrian civil war. Through the eyes of activists, instigators, victims, helpless bystanders, refugees, and ruthless killers, readers witness as Syria dissolves into a lawless territory with three main factions and their own competing subgroups: the dictatorship, the rebels fighting for democracy, and the Islamic extremists. As the war heated up, death was so commonplace that people became dehumanized, with casualties only known as the day's number. Abouzeid pens personal narratives as great family epics during a period of change, sorrow, and upheaval. Suleiman, a well-off young man, demonstrates the power of social media by posting protests online. Mohammad, a family man, shows how and why he turned to Islamic extremism. Ruah, a young girl, ends up a refugee in Turkey, alive, but still mentally in Syria. Abu Azzam, a poet, emerges as a leader in the Free Syrian Army. VERDICT A brilliant, detailed work on a devastating topic. For readers interested in narrative nonfiction, the Syrian war, the Middle East, and personal accounts. [See Prepub Alert, 9/11/17.]-Heidi Uphoff, Sandia National Laboratories, NM © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.