A doctor's memoir of life in Jerusalem

摘要

Emma Williams has worked as a doctor in the UK, Pakistan, Afghanistan, New York, South Africa, and Jerusalem, yet has managed to snatch time to write this superbly informative account of her time in strife-torn Jerusalem. If she is as fine a physician as she is a memoirist, I would entrust her with my own innards any day of the week. It's Easier to Reach Heaven than the End of the Street-a splendidly inventive title for a book about life in Jerusalem-delivers its narrative in lucid, unflinching, mesmerising detail. It is, among other things, excellently informative about the Palestinian-Israeli hostilities, and anyone who wants to bone up on the history of this desperate deadlock in the most enjoyable, least arid way could do worse than start here. Williams began her career after Oxford University as a surgeon, before moving, while in South Africa, into research on the role of the uterine cervix on the transmission of HIV. When her husband was posted by the United Nations to Jerusalem, the family transplanted themselves from New York to a small village on the border of East and West Jerusalem, where the author worked with Palestinians in Ramallah during the day-working on a childbirth project at local hospital-and spent her evenings with Israelis in Tel Aviv.