Footnotes in Gaza - Paperback

by Joe Sacco (Author)

Ridenhour Book Prize Winner
Eisner Award Winner for Nonfiction

"Sacco brings the conflict down to the most human level, allowing us to imagine our way inside it, to make the desperation he discovers, in some small way, our own."--Los Angeles Times

From one of the leading cartoonists of our time comes an ambitious and timely historical excavation.

Rafah, a town at the bottommost tip of the Gaza Strip, has long been a notorious flashpoint in the bitter Middle East conflict. Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident, in 1956, that left 111 Palestinians shot dead by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafah--cold-blooded massacre or dreadful mistake--reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war.

In a quest to get to the heart of what happened, Joe Sacco immerses himself in the daily life of Rafah and the neighboring town of Khan Younis, uncovering Gaza past and present. As in Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, his unique visual journalism renders a contested landscape in brilliant, meticulous detail. Spanning fifty years, moving fluidly between one war and the next, Footnotes in Gaza--Sacco's most ambitious work to date--transforms a critical conflict of our age into intimate and immediate experience.

Author Biography

Joe Sacco, one of the world's foremost cartoonists, is the author of, among other books, The Once and Future Riot, Palestine which received the American Book Award, and Safe Area Gorazde, which won the Eisner Award and was named Time magazine's best comic book of 2000. His books have been translated into fourteen languages and his comics reporting has appeared in Details, The New York Times Magazine, Time, and Harper's. He lives in Portland, Oregon.