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No Turning Back

Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria

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No Turning Back

By: Rania Abouzeid
Narrated by: Susan Nezami
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About this listen

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 21st century's greatest humanitarian disasters.

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.

©2018 Rania Abouzeid (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
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The most-even handed account of the Syrian crisis

There are other books that perhaps give a more accessible introductory overview, such as Assad or We Burn the Country, but they tend to be at least somewhat polemical, and centre the secular civilian activist narrative of the developing crisis. This has its place, and it is a perspective Abouzeid includes. But she also gets under the skin of the armed uprising and the sectarian salafi currents in a way that no other reporter has managed.

One particular strength of the book is the use of deeply-reporte individual stories to show how the perspectives of participants in various political currents changed over time, and how they differed from the official presentation of those currents. This dissensions is so important for reminding us that political currents are not fixed and homogeneous. They consist of thinking, feeling people, whose views are less fixed and straightforward than they appear from the outside.

The narrator is good. Although she has an Arabic name and Arabic accent she seems to choose to deliberately mispronounce a few words, perhaps on the belief it will make them more accessible to the non-Arabic speaking listener. This is sometimes odd, but never a real problem.

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Hard hitting but a must listen/read

Really engaging narration. A hard hitting glimpse into the lives of various people during the Syrian civil war

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