Books
A close reading of the books that are making waves.
on :
Tuesday, 9 Apr, 2013
There is a story from the Mubarak era about a Cairo shopkeeper who had a portrait of each of Gamal Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak decorating the wall of his shop. A passing tourist asked the shopkeeper about the portraits and he replied, “The first led the 1952 revolution, the second led Egypt in the 1973 war and the third—he is the father of Ala'a, my business partner.” This tale reveals as much about the Egyptian sense of humor as it does about the rising discontent that swept th...
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on :
Wednesday, 13 Mar, 2013
Syria was the first modern Arab state to come into existence and the first Arab republic to elect its president, and it had the first Arab army to procure arms from the Soviet Union. Syria was also the first Arab democracy to elect an Islamist to parliament (Mustapha Al-Sibai in 1947), and the first Arab dictatorship to witness an armed jihadist insurrection (waged by the Fighting Vanguard, 1975–1982).
Syria, then, has something of the pioneering spirit; where its elites have led, o...
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on :
Saturday, 23 Feb, 2013
Few scholars have had a better view of the catastrophic car crash that is modern Iraq than the British academic Toby Dodge. Originally one of a small group of experts called ...
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on :
Tuesday, 22 Jan, 2013
With his first book for a popular audience, Fooled by Randomness (2001), the statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb quickly became the new century’s favorite skeptic: We li...
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on :
Tuesday, 8 Jan, 2013
In a steamy University of Damascus classroom, Arabic language students attempt to translate Samar Yazbek’s novel Cinnamon. Heads are buried inside diction...
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on :
Wednesday, 2 Jan, 2013
At nearly 73 years of age, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi is one of the most famous Iranian novelists. Some critics have even praised him as Iran’s Tolstoy, Balzac, or Kafka. In truth, ...
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on :
Saturday, 29 Dec, 2012
With the reelection of President Obama and hints in the international media that diplomatic wrangling over Iran’s nuclear program is set to resume in early 2013, the question...
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on :
Monday, 29 Oct, 2012
Stephen Starr spent several years in Syria prior to the uprising against Bashar Al-Assad, which began almost two years ago and doesn’t seem likely to end soon. This long expe...
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on :
Tuesday, 9 Oct, 2012
Jerusalem is a beautiful, inspiring work, as much about communities and cultures, festivity and family, as it is about food.
As its authors note, "The flavours and smells of ...
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on :
Tuesday, 25 Sep, 2012
It is often quite difficult to develop a new understanding of a historical event years after it occurs. But a group of scholars at the National Security Archive (NSA), a Wa...
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