I've been thinking a lot about Israel and Palestine this summer, what with the Israeli pullout from Gaza, and the chilling HBO documentary I watched, Death in Gaza. I bought this book a while ago, and I think now is the time to read it.

This book is not that long, a little more than 200 pages of very sparse text, but it took me quite a few long bus rides to read, just feasting on the lovely details of Joe Sacco's black-and-white drawings. The artist is certainly an equal-opportunity offender when it comes to drawing faces: like R. Crumb, he makes everybody look pretty ugly. But the perspectives he chooses--looking down from a hilltop or obliquely down the street at a violent scene--and the lovingly rendered textures and details of each scene more than make up for that.

Politically, I'd say this book is less evenhanded than the HBO documentary Death in Gaza, my other recent source of information on the Palestinian territories. It dwells way more on brutal and arbitrary treatment of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and police, and less on any violence done by Palestinians. Still, it's fascinating to get the day-to-day feel of Palestinian life, not to mention the history and politics, from someone who has spent as much time there as Joe Sacco.