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Book Reviewed by:From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values.
On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this." This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.
As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.
This is El Akkad's nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.
2025 National Book Awards Finalists Announced
I'm always surprised when these lists come out. I consider myself fairly well-read, and I see reviews for many many books besides the ones I put on my personal list. But often I'm completely unfamiliar with those that end up being nominated for awards. I've only read The Antidote by Karen Russell...
-kim.kovacs
El Akkad places a large part of the blame not only on politicians, but also on the press, a world he knows well. His book is a hybrid memoir of sorts, and it incorporates his personal story of being born in Egypt, growing up in Qatar, and moving as a teenager to Canada, where he began writing for his college newspaper shortly after 9/11, later covering a variety of international stories for the Toronto Globe and Mail. He despairs at what his profession has become, the "tortured, spineless" way in which newspaper headlines characterize acts of war (an example from The Guardian: "Palestinian Journalist Hit in Head by Bullet During Raid on Terror Suspect's Home"). The journalist's job, El Akkad argues, is "to agitate against silence," but too often these days, Western journalists, paralyzed by the need for "self-erasing neutrality," resort to "a flattened mode, listing claim and counterclaim, measuring the impact on the poll numbers. Everything becomes a horse race."..continued
Full Review
(928 words)
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Ece Temelkuran, author of How To Lose a Country
If we, as humans, are lucky enough, we will someday be ashamed of ourselves for what is happening in the world today before our eyes. Some of us can already see that day and are deeply disgusted by the collective hypocrisy that waits until it is safe to shout out the crimes. It is not easy to write or talk when you feel that disgust; it chokes you and breaks your faith in humanity. One can hear that all-too-human disgust in Omar El Akkad's words. However, what is also audible in his words is his determination to keep his faith in humans. Only those who can write with such rage and love will give a heart to a heartless world. His poetic voice, with its elegant power, can only come from those who are one with the world, with its joy and pain. Jeff VanderMeer
I feel inadequate to describe a book like this with the right superlatives—I don't want to reduce the book down to one thing in doing so... but I hope Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This will find a large audience. Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars
I can't think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. Doom and gloom and unspeakable horror abound and overwhelm these days, but it remains important to understand what we already know is happening now and how it will be understood in the future. It helps when we feel helpless to give our time and attention, our hearts and consideration to a voice like this, a book like this, from our particular time and for it. There is so much power in language here, where it is difficult to find words, such heart in a world that feels has lost its way. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn't anymore. Please read this. I promise you won't regret it. I honestly don't know how you could.
In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad levels several critiques against Western liberalism and its contradictions. One of the most damning is this: "It's difficult to live in this country in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be...Saying the right slogans supersedes whatever it is those slogans are supposed to oblige." One of the most visible sets of slogans about progressive beliefs, nearly ubiquitous in some residential neighborhoods in so-called blue states, has become the subject of both inspiration and ridicule: the "In this house, we ...
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