The Day the Pagers Exploded reclaims Lebanon’s story from orientalist narratives

Writing as an act of rebellion and public service: In his book The Day the Pagers Exploded, Palestinian-Lebanese physician Hisham Sheikh Hassan delivers an extraordinary eyewitness account documenting the all-out war waged on Lebanon in the fall of 2024. Beginning with the shock of the pager detonations and expanding into a ground invasion, bombardment of the south and Dahiyeh, and mass displacement, the text stands as a nuanced, sensitive existential document.

The big picture: Writing from Beirut’s emergency rooms and the Southern Suburbs, Hassan uses an intimate, cinematic voice to thrust readers into the middle of the crisis — offering a stark counter-narrative to the sterile detachment of international news tickers. He dismantles decades of Orientalist framing in Western newsrooms, where Arab history, anti-colonial resistance, trauma, and culture have long been distorted through lenses that transform victims into threats while hand-delivering blanket immunity to aggressors. It’s a powerful perspective coming from a surgeon who returned to Beirut in 2023 after spending 24 years practicing medicine across Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Ireland.

The narrative goes beyond wartime journaling to offer an ethnographic and intergenerational history. Hassan carries the memory of his own family, who were driven from Haifa and Safed at gunpoint in 1948 and fled along valley paths into Lebanon, only to watch the exact same tragedy replay today in Nabatieh, Sidon, and Dahiyeh. He weaves past and present together, contrasting the olive groves his brother was prevented from harvesting due to shelling in the south with the village minarets his carpenter grandfather hand-carved, now being flattened by military bulldozers. This historical tracing transforms the landscape into a witness, exposing the bombing not as random destruction but as an attempt to erase ancestral geography.

What we liked: Hassan writes with a delicate, captivating style that immerses the reader without resorting to melodrama. He balances the sharp precision of a physician with unadulterated human tenderness, avoiding emotional exploitation or bids for pity. Instead of reducing human suffering to cold emergency statistics, he captures it through devastating details. Equally compelling is the book’s refusal to portray its subjects as passive victims. Hassan honors their agency and dignity, showing how local communities forge active, resilient solidarity within the rhythms of daily survival.

The verdict: This is an existential testament charged with raw anger and pride. Ultimately, The Day the Pagers Exploded proves that honest storytelling and active memory remain our first and last line of defense against historical erasure.

WHERE TO GET IT- You can find the paperback at AUC Press and Diwan. You can also get the e-book on Amazon and Kobo.