Book reviews: ‘One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This’ and ‘How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art’

Examining the West’s role in Gaza’s war and how the art market has ruined art

A person stands near destroyed buildings in Gaza
One Day “is a demanding read—not for its prose but for what it asks of us.”
(Image credit: Getty Images)

‘One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This’ by Omar El Akkad

Omar El Akkad’s new best-seller about the war on Gaza is “damn hard to put down,” said Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. “Powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic,” it’s the anguished cry of a celebrated novelist and disillusioned U.S. citizen who has followed the daily horrors of the war from afar and couldn’t remain silent about the West’s complicity in the carnage. El Akkad, who was born in Egypt and raised in Qatar and Canada, worked as a foreign correspondent for Toronto’s Globe and Mail before he wrote the acclaimed novels American War and What Strange Paradise. Though he thoroughly condemns Hamas for its massacre of 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, he characterizes the response as eye-opening proof that the humanist ideals championed by the West have always been lies. I finished the book in two short sittings, and “by the end, my heart was drumming.”

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