Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution: Voices from Tunis to Damascus
*Starred Review* By now, you’ve heard of the Arab Spring. But most of the secondhand accounts you’ve read were composed in the safety of a news studio. Or, at best, from the balcony of a hotel overlooking the bloody streets of Cairo and Benghazi. For readers interested in the personal, firsthand stories of the young men and women who stood and fought in those chaotic city squares throughout the Middle East, the English PEN Award–winning Diaries adds a vastly different, historically vital perspective on the Arab Spring’s revolutions-in-progress. Beginning in Tunisia, where student activist Malek Sghiri is kidnapped and tortured for joining a protest group at his university, and ending in Syria, where the academic turned poet Khawla Dunia examines her country’s history of activism and dissent under the Assad dynasty, these eye-opening, untold accounts from students and local journalists alike are as essential to the historical record as they are to the outsider looking to understand what the Arab Spring is really about. The voices here are unfiltered, uncompromising, and unafraid, as the 26-year-old Sghiri proves when he tells his torturers, “I hope that God grants you a long life, that you might get to interrogate my son as well.” --Adam Morgan