BEN EHRENREICH READS FROM HIS NEWEST BOOK THE WAY TO THE SPRING: LIFE AND DEATH IN PALESTINE

The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (Penguin Press)

From an award-winning journalist, a brave and necessary immersion into the everyday struggles of Palestinian life.

Over the past three years, American writer Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, staying with Palestinian families in its largest cities and its smallest villages. Along the way he has written major stories for American outlets, including a remarkable "New York Times Magazine" cover story. Now comes the powerful new work that has always been his ultimate goal, The Way to the Spring. 

We are familiar with brave journalists who travel to bleak or war-torn places on a mission to listen and understand, to gather the stories of people suffering from extremes of oppression and want: Katherine Boo, Ryszard Kapuciski, Ted Conover, and Philip Gourevitch among them. Palestine is, by any measure, whatever one's politics, one such place. Ruled by the Israeli military, set upon and harassed constantly by Israeli settlers who admit unapologetically to wanting to drive them from the land, forced to negotiate an ever more elaborate and more suffocating series of fences, checkpoints, and barriers that have sundered home from field, home from home, this is a population whose living conditions are unique, and indeed hard to imagine. In a great act of bravery, empathy and understanding, Ben Ehrenreich, by placing us in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians and telling their story with surpassing literary power and grace, makes it impossible for us to turn away.

Praise for The Way to the Spring

"Ben Ehrenreich's rendition of the Palestinian experience is powerful, deep and heartbreaking, so much closer to the ground than the Middle East reporting we usually see. I wish there were more writers as brave."--Adam Hochschild

"As heart-breaking as it is, The Way to the Spring is also a strangely joyful book, because Ehrenreich grasps the essence of the Palestinian struggle: not Islam, or even nationalism, but the stubborn refusal of injustice, the restless search for how it would feel to be free, as Nina Simone said. The Way to the Spring is more than a work of journalism. It is a freedom song, burning with humanity."--Adam Shatz

Ben Ehrenreich is a journalist whose writing has appeared in LA Weekly, the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Book Review, and many other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.