Assaf and his family had always led a happy and integrated life in Canada, his ancestors having come over from the Lebanon over a century ago. But although the book opens with a huge multicultural celebration of Toronto’s team willing the national basketball championship, it soon turns to the horror of his family’s persecution post-9/11, his Alberta-born parents told to go home and victimised by their neighbours (while, it must be said, other neighbours pulled together to support them) and then the wider situation with the police and secret services trying to infiltrate mosques with a constructed narrative around radicalism that they didn’t see in their community. But as well as discussing this division and its causes (mostly down to Donald Trump and his ideology’s ascendancy south of the border, as well as the divisions wrought by misinformation and fake news on social media) he does discuss both the theory and the practice of ending division and pulling together.

Full review on my blog https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2021/05/16/book-review-dany-assaf-say-please-and-thank-you-and-stand-in-line/