Children Of The Stone—The Power Of Music In A Hard Land

This article is an indirect book recommendation for those looking for summer holiday reading. It’s not a light-hearted beach read, but nonetheless a really compelling true story, written like a novel. Its author, Sandy Tolan, is an award-winning American journalist and former journalism lecturer of mine. I enjoyed his first book on the Middle East, The Lemon Tree, so I was looking forward to reading this second one, titled Children of the Stone—The Power of Music in a Hard Land.

It tells the incredible, unlikely life story of Ramzi Aburedwan, a stone-throwing poster boy of the first intifada, who is now using music to bring ‘normality’ to Palestinian life. He found his love for the violin, then realised his dream of building a music school. He soon attracted musicians from all over the world to help and transformed the lives of thousands of children just like him.

This article gives a ‘taster’ of Ramzi’s life and left me wanting to know more, which is where the book comes in.

After I finished the book, I found an interview with author Sandy Tolan in which he mentions two things he hopes readers will take away from it. For me, they sum up exactly how I felt after reading it:

“One is to connect with a universal story—written, I hope, like a page-turning novel—of a young man with a dream who never gives up and builds something beautiful that inspires thousands of others. The other is for readers to see how ordinary people—in this case, mostly Palestinian children—maintain their dignity and hope under the tremendously difficult restrictions on travel and often daily encounter with soldiers.”