Children of the StoneBy Sandy Tolan
Bloomsbury, £17.99
Reviewed by Norman Lebrecht
A London orchestral violinist I know spends her summer leave working with cancer kids in Africa. A French bassoonist takes a 100-kilometre run in support of an educational mission. An Australian violinist volunteers for Médecin sans Frontières. Few occupations in my experience are as caring, as giving of time and effort in good causes, as that of the classical musician.
Over the years, I have seen dozens of European and American musicians backpack off to Ramallah with the aim of training Palestinian youngsters to play in orchestras. Although many return with a restricted view of the situation, I have always assumed that their civilising presence did some good. Reading Sandy Tolan's one-eyed, unquestioning, hopelessly sentimental narrative of "the power of music in a hard land", I am forced to reconsider every aspect of that assumption.
This should have been an uplifting human story. Ramzi Aburedwan is the child whose picture was splashed across the world's front pages and the walls of Ramallah in 1988 when he was snapped during the first Intifada throwing stones at the mechanised forces of Israeli occupation. Not since David faced Goliath has an image acquired such power of metaphor.
