Category: Middle East
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The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) by Peter Frankopan
Western civilization – and, by extension, much of world history – is often presented as a seamless chain of causally linked events stretching back to antiquity. In its simplest form, the narrative runs like this: Ancient Greece gave rise to Imperial Rome; Rome shaped Christian Europe; Christian Europe produced the Renaissance, which sparked the Enlightenment…
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Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2002) by Michael Oren
Few armed conflicts in history have be shorter, more decisive, or more consequential than the Six Day War of June 1967. Over the course of just 132 hours the tiny upstart state of Israel conquered 42,000 square miles, including the Old City of Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria,…
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The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2010) by Jonathan Schneer
On November 2, 1917, with the First World War still raging fiercely along the Western Front and crackling in the Middle East as the Arabs revolted against their Turkish overlords, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour made a stunning declaration: “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the…
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Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2013) by Scott Anderson
The story of T.E. Lawrence and the Sykes-Picot agreement has been told many times before. Nowhere perhaps better than David Fromkin’s award-winning “A Peace to End All Peace.” Scott Anderson tackles the topic from an interesting angle. He tells the story in narrative form following four inter-related characters: T.E. Lawrence; the Jewish spy-leader, Aaron Aaronsohn;…
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Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to Present (2007) by Michael Oren
American involvement in the Middle East has dominated US foreign policy since at least the Iranian Revolution of 1979. But, as American-Israeli scholar Michael Oren writes in “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to Present,” US involvement in the Middle East is long and complex, dating from literally the founding of…
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