Brothers of the Gun

<b>A bracingly immediate memoir by a young man coming of age during the Syrian war&#160;an intimate lens on the century&#146;s bloodiest conflict and a profound meditation on kinship home and freedom.</b><br><br> <b><b><b>A&#160;<i>NEW YORK TIMES&#160;</i>NOTABLE BOOK &#149;&#160;</b>LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD&#160;</b>&#149;&#160;&#147;This powerful memoir illuminated with Molly Crabapple&#146;s extraordinary art provides a rare lens through which we can see a region in deadly conflict.&#148;&#151;Bryan Stevenson author of <i>Just Mercy</i></b><br><br> In 2011 Marwan Hisham and his two friends&#151;fellow working-class college students Nael and Tareq&#151;joined the first protests of the Arab Spring in Syria in response to a recent massacre. Arm-in-arm they marched poured Coca-Cola into one another&#146;s eyes to blunt the effects of tear gas ran from the security forces and cursed the country&#146;s president Bashar al-Assad. It was ecstasy. A long-bottled revolution was finally erupting and freedom from a brutal dictator seemed at last imminent. Five years later the three young friends were scattered: one now an Islamist revolutionary another dead at the hands of government soldiers and the last Marwan now a journalist in Turkish exile trying to find a way back to a homeland reduced to rubble.<br><br> Marwan was there to witness and document firsthand the Syrian war from its inception to the present. He watched from the rooftops as regime warplanes bombed soldiers; as revolutionary activist groups for a few dreamy days spray-painted hope on Raqqa; as his friends died or threw in their lot with Islamist fighters. He became a journalist by courageously tweeting out news from a city under siege by ISIS the Russians and the Americans all at once. He saw the country that ran through his veins&#151;the country that held his hopes dreams and fears&#151;be destroyed in front of him and eventually joined the relentless stream of refugees risking their lives to escape.<br><br> Illustrated with more than eighty ink drawings by Molly Crabapple that bring to life the beauty and chaos <i>Brothers of the Gun</i> offers a ground-level reflection on the Syrian revolution&#151;and how it bled into international catastrophe and global war. This is a story of pragmatism and idealism impossible violence and repression and even in the midst of war profound acts of courage creativity and hope.<br><br><b>&#147;A book of startling emotional power and intellectual depth.&#148;&#151;Pankaj Mishra author of <i>Age of Anger </i>and <i>From the Ruins of Empire<br></i></b><br><b>&#147;A revelatory and necessary read on one of the most destructive wars of our time.&#148;&#151;Angela Davis</b>