A Crazy Occupation (Jamie Tarabay, A&U, $26.95 pb, ISBN 174114650X, September) ***

Jamie Tarabay spent her childhood moving around the world, but spent formative parts of it here in Australia and—for a sharp contrast—in her family’s homeland of Lebanon, where there was a civil war going on. In an example of life going full circle, she returned to the troubled turf of the Middle East as an adult, working as a correspondent for Associated Press, based in Israel. A Crazy Occupation covers the years from 2000 to 2005 when Tarabay worked the Middle East, hunting for bodies in the wreckage of Jenin, interviewing the survivors of suicide bombers, watching (and reporting) as the political dramas of Israel made things increasingly violent and frightening around her. It is a book that (broadly) treads pretty familiar ground in the ‘modern women, life crisis, followed by dramatic change, all set on foreign soil’ subset of biography. You will have readers that love this stuff. The difference in A Crazy Occupation is that it’s written by a professional journo and it’s written well. It also chronicles the experiences of an Australian woman journalist in the Middle East, something not seen (to my memory) since Nine Parts of Desire.

Eliza Metcalfe is the assistant editor of AB&P

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2004, Thorpe-Bowker