Beat: The True Story of a Suicide Bomb and a Heart by Rowan Somerville
On June 1st 2001, a suicide bomb killed twenty-one young Israelis outside a nightclub in Tel Aviv. The next day, in an apparently retributive act of violence, an Israeli settler shot a Palestinian pharmacist, Mazan Al-Joulani, in the neck, rendering him brain dead. Out of this violence came an extraordinary act of humanity, when the family of Al-Joulani agreed to donate his heart to Yigal Cohen, a dying Israeli. Rowan Somerville, the son of two cardiologists, travelled to the Levant to talk to survivors, families, the surgeon who performed the transplant and the family of the suicide bomber. In this powerful story, Somerville untangles the roots of violence, faith and tribal conflict, and the possibility of redemption.