What was it Stalin once said? A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic? Dates too, in the sea of history, can shed their essence and become empty numbers in the expanse of time. I thought a lot about this as I read Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile, an…
Tag: war
Embroiled in a bloody civil war since 2011, Syria has long been subject to coups, repressive regimes, and state sanctioned surveillance.* Death Is Hard Work, the latest novel from Syrian author Khaled Khalifa, is infused with lived experience and captures the utter disruption of life in a war-zone. The author bombards the reader with all the horrors…