Palestine - Books (Joe Sacco, Paperback)

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Customer Reviews of Palestine

sozz7
London
30th December 2008

Brilliant
Inspirational and engrossing, it feels genuine and provides an insight into life in the East, in a refreshing way when we're saturated in the UK with one sided news reports.

Keep it up Joe Sacco and those like him...

lexo1941
Dublin, Ireland
21st December 2008

Brilliant, harrowing, unflinching. Oh, and sometimes it's really funny. But only sometimes.
Joe Sacco's earliest work in comics is some of the funniest and most extravagantly over-the-top graphic work this writer has ever read. I have been an on-again, off-again reader of comics since I was a kid, starting - like so many UK/Irish boys who were young in the 70s - with simple stuff like "Battle" and "Action", rediscovering the power of the drawn panel in the late 80s with things like Frank Miller's "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns", and the work of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, and being lucky enough to surf the wave of amazing creativity that reared up in the 90s with titles like Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" and Grant Morrison's fabulously unhinged run of "Doom Patrol".

So I didn't come to Joe Sacco's work as someone who had never read a comic before. I knew that comics didn't necessarily involve girls with enormous breasts and guys who could, like, break guns in half with their mind (to paraphrase "Mystery Men"). I had also read a little about the Arab-Israeli conflict, so I wasn't even totally unaware of what Sacco was talking about.

Nevertheless, "Palestine" knocked my socks off. Part of Sacco's genius as a journalist/writer/artist is that he puts himself into the frame - a small, rather anxious American with Lennon glasses and an unusually wide mouth, who gets into arguments with sexy Israeli girls about the occupied territories and the right of return but who still can't help wondering if he's got a chance of getting laid.

Sacco's earlier work is collected in the laugh-out-loud hilarious "Notes from a Defeatist", which followed something like a maturation from Sacco the chronicler of grungy punk bands to Sacco the struggling, self-doubting, worry-wart artist increasingly troubled by politics and injustice. "Palestine" is of necessity a dark and worrying book. The high spirits of his earlier work are gone, but he is recognisably the same guy: older, more curious about the world around him and more willing to let the people around him tell their stories in their own way. One of these is a Palestinian joke, involving a CIA man, a KGB man and a Shin Bet (Israeli domestic security) man. I won't retell it here because it's too good to spoil, but Sacco's version of it is both hilarious and terrifying.

There is an appreciative and sensitive foreword by the late Edward W. Said, but in truth the book is its own recommendation. Joe Sacco's work has the great virtue of being a purely personal response; he doesn't have the newspaper journalist's need to at least pretend to be "objective" or "balanced". This means that he lets far more information come through than somebody constrained by deadlines and copy length. Sacco is also a lot funnier and better company than Robert Fisk.

A great deal of guff has been written about the Palestinians, most of it by non-Palestinians - most of it, indeed, by Americans. Joe Sacco's "Palestine" is a distinguished exception.

Viking
Notts, England
8th October 2007

Shocking
This was my first venture into graphic novels. All my life i've never been able to get into fiction, I'd stick to books on religion, war etc so when a friend pointed out that there are graphic novels/comics based on real events I thought I'd give it a go (I always assumed graphics novels were about fantasy figures/men in tight spandex outfits throwing balls of fire at women with blue hair)

I read "Palestine" in about 5 sittings, I read it before bed for about an hour each night until I was too tired, I couldn't put it down. Some of the interviews/reports really did shock me and I had to put it down a couple of times. Not just the stories themselves shocked me but the fact that I had no idea these events happened/are happening. Can't recommened this enough.

happy camper
manchester, uk
7th October 2006

An important book
An outstanding, sensitive and compelling work. Be in no doubt, this is not a graphic novel. Sacco is a superb journalist who conveys the experiences of long-suffering Palesenians through remarkable illustrated interviews, but the illustrations serve simply to contextualise these harrowing true stories. If only this were required reading for the Bush administration...

helaw
London
4th October 2006

Offers a real insight
This book offers an insight into the lives of the palestinians, it offers you the side of the story that is not told by the mainstream press. From what you learn about the terrible treatement of the palestinians, the israeli aggression and opression towards them one realises why they resort to such terrible things such as suicide bombing. This book instills sympathy for palestinians and automatically makes you hate all injustice in the world.

from reading this book, one cannot help to think that the israelis have only brought this on themselves, any suicide bombing (which of course is wrong) is only as a result of their inhumane ill-treatement of the palestinians, and they only have themselves to blame. Reading this book one realises the origins of the arab hatred toward the state of israel.