LAUSR

steal in order to eat better. Others figured out heroic ways to travel long distances to find family members. They held on to life despite the surrounding trauma. Maksudyan backs up her argument with rich survival narratives, but does not engage deeply with the politics of memory. A growing critical mass of books on children and youth in the Middle East (Beth Baron, Heidi Morrison, Benjamin Fortna, Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim) opens the door for engagement with issues that crisscross the field of children’s studies. Maksudyan’s book is a great launching point, for example, to problematize the concept and experience of children’s agency in the context of the Middle East. The popularity of uncovering children’s agency must not belie important questions such as: What authority do historians have to accord or refuse agency to the subjects of their work? What role do racial, gender, and class politics play in limiting or privileging different forms of agency? What exists between and across the binary categories of powerful vs. powerless (adult vs. child)? What is at stake when adults try to “liberate” children? How do we define agency in different times and places? Maksudyan’s book also provides exciting new material to put in dialogue with Nadera ShalhoubKevorkian’s new concept of “unchilding,” or “a violent racial regime of control that actively maintains the machinery of dismemberment always and everywhere” (Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Incarcerated Childhoods and the Politics of Unchilding [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019], 22). Whether it be Armenian children in early-20th-century Ottoman lands or Palestinian children in contemporary Israel and the Occupied Territories, young people’s relationship to power structures is a rich area of research. Maksudyan’s book pushes the boundaries of historiography by viewing World War I through the eyes of children and youth. Additionally, she focuses on orphans, some of the most vulnerable groups in this period. It will be a great day when distinguished scholars such as Maksudyan do not have to dedicate a portion of the book’s introduction to justifying the inclusion of young people in historical research.