|
My Name is Rachel Corrie | 
 enlarge | Author: Rachel Corrie
Creators: Alan Rickman, Katharine Viner
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
Buy Used: $4.95
You Save: $8.00 (62%)
New (31) Used (16) from $4.95
Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 179606
Media: Paperback
Pages: 96
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 4.9 x 0.3
ISBN: 1559362960
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9781559362962
ASIN: 1559362960
Publication Date: September 1, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: **Books may NOT include Online Access Codes (InfoTrac, MyEconLab).** Books MAY contain highlighting, writing, and/or bent pages. We ship M - F.
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
"A powerful, thought-provoking and deeply moving piece of theatre."-Daily Telegraph
"Theatre can't change the world. But what it can do, when it's as good as this, is to send us out enriched by other people's passionate concern."-Guardian
I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls. You just can't imagine it unless you see it. And even then your experience is not at all the reality . . . [due to] the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and of course, the fact that I have the option of leaving. I am allowed to see the ocean.-Rachel Corrie
On March 16, 2003, Rachel Corrie, a twenty-three-year-old American, was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip as she was trying to prevent the demolition of the Palestinian homes. My Name is Rachel Corrie is a one-woman play composed from Rachel's own journals, letters, and e-mails-creating a portrait of a messy, skinny, articulate, Salvador Dal-loving chain-smoker (with a passion for the music of Pat Benatar), who left home and school in Olympia, Washington, "to support Palestinian non-violent resistance to Israel's military occupation." The piece premiered at London's Royal Court Theatre, with an award-winning, sold-out run, before its transfer to the West End.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Stunning May 3, 2006
Martin E. Zimmann (Dundee, Michigan USA)
45 out of 63 found this review helpful
This book. This story. This life. This world-- it's all in there. It should be part of social science curriculum in high schools and colleges. Rachel was a person of conviction. Her life and witness inspire us all.
we must not let the light go out May 3, 2006
J. Glynn
41 out of 55 found this review helpful
This tiny 52 page book is one of the most important pieces that I have read in my life. Rachel Corrie's writing, backed up by her work as a 5th grader and as an adult, is humbling. Alan Rickman's editing and placement is briliant.
This book should be on every book club's list and on every thearter company's stage.
correction to review below June 20, 2006
Molly Myers (Brooklyn, NY United States)
28 out of 41 found this review helpful
Ms. Corrie belonged to the ISM (International Solidarity movement), not the PSM. The ISM is an organization dedicated to non-violence.
Better Writing than Expected October 15, 2006
Stanley W. Rogouski Jr. (New Jersey, USA)
25 out of 31 found this review helpful
I read a lot of political websites and was very familiar with the story behind this book when I decided to catch the play at the Minetta Lane Theater.
What surprised me about this book was the quality of Corrie's writing itself. A lot of Corrie's detractors hate her passionately because of their support for Israel's policy against the Palestinians in Gaza but they should give this book a closer look.
"My Name is Rachel Corrie" is not strictly a piece of anti-Israel agit prop, although it is certainly that. It's also a very personal story of an American confronting the effect of her government's foreign policy in a part of the world most of us will never see, an emotional travelogue to the heart of the darkness of the American Empire.
Nobody, of course, would compare Rachel Corrie to Joseph Conrad (who hadn't even learned English by the age of 23). But the process of exploring the self by traveling to the margins of the empire is the same. Corrie feels a sense of dread and purposelessness in Olympia (a first world city, one of those "whited sepulchers" Conrad mentions) that becomes more and more urgent after 9/11 so she decides to travel to the Gaza Strip and become a partisan for one group of people the American and Israeli governments would simply like to see disappear.
To argue that she should have become an objective witness instead of an openly partisan activist is to miss the point. An objective witness stands above the people stuck in a war zone (think of Eddie Adam's famous photo of the VC guerilla being executed) and this wouldn't have allowed her to confront the power relationship that exists between Americans and people like the Palestinians. By getting involved, she was able to free that part of herself that all Americans feel closed off to by our hostile relation to the rest of the world.
And the remarkable thing is that she was quite aware of this. Compare the surrealistic little vignette about her time as a volunteer at a mental health center where she's accused by her clients of putting herself above them to the way the older Palestinian woman argues against taking money from rich Americans. "We're not a hotel." Rachel Corrie struggles to let these people speak for themselves, even while she's using them to explore herself.
In other words, even if you're opposed to Corrie's politics, this book is still worth reading. Maybe the writing itself should get 3.5 stars. But I gave it 5 simply because I was touched by the fact that this book allowed so villified a woman to speak for herself from beyond the grave.
Your tax dollars killed Rachel Corrie September 28, 2006
Charles F. Held Jr. (Charlotte, NC United States)
22 out of 33 found this review helpful
Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address succinctly defines sensible foreign policy: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." Obviously the US has violated Jefferson's wisdom and spirit with greater, more intense, more expensive, and more tragic frequency. There is hardly a nation on the planet where the United States has not engaged in overt or covert military action - or taken sides based solely on political considerations.
Nowhere have these violations been more blatant or more bloody than in the Middle East. The US-Israel relationship is not merely an "entangling alliance", it is suffocating double-standard. Israel is the region's only nuclear power, yet it refuses to acknowledge it, imprisons those who talk about it, and shuts its doors to IAEA inspectors. It claims to be a US ally, yet it deliberately attacked the USS Liberty and engaged in multiple spying operations including the Jonathan Pollard and Larry Franklin affairs. And it the only nation receiving US military aid which is not required to spend that aid with American companies.
From Lyndon Johnson through George W. Bush, US presidents have been arrogant enough to believe that they can act as "mediators" in Middle Eastern conflicts, despite the overwhelming pro-Israel bias of American policy in the region. Add to that American ignorance of the local cultures and customs - Arab and Israeli both - and you have a recipe for repeated disaster which culminated in September of 2001. After all, if another nation tried to do to the US what the US is doing to sovereign Arab nations, what would we do? That's right, bomb the snot out of them, with 100% justification.
Meanwhile billions of our dollars flow unabated into Israel's war machine every year, including 300,000 cluster bomblets dumped into Lebanon THE DAY AFTER the August 2006 cease-fire. And the only response ever given when any of these points is brought up? Shrill claims of "anti-Semitism". Well, I for one am GLAD to hear such accusations, because it means that the person engaged in such infantile kneejerk namecalling obviously has no rational position from which to defend Israel's actions.
Radical Israel-firsters pressured American theaters into censoring the production of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie". This is particularly sickening when it was an American-built bulldozer piloted by an American-funded Israeli soldier who brazenly, brutally and deliberately attacked her over and over until she was dead.
Buy Rachel's book now before Amazon again reports that it is suspiciously "unavailable".
|
|
|
|
| |
