Showing titles in Middle East

Based on months spent with the battalions in Fallujah and hundreds of interviews at every level (senior policymakers, negotiators, generals, and soldiers and Marines on the front lines) No True Glory is a testament to the bravery of the American soldier and a cautionary tale about the complex, and often costly, interconnected roles of policy, politics, and battle in the twenty-first century.

When Europe's Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against the Turks. The British supported the Arabs' fight for an independent state and sent an intelligence officer, T. E. Lawrence, to join Prince Faisal, leader of the Arab army and a descendant of the Prophet. In October 1918, Faisal, Lawrence, and the Arabs victoriously entered Damascus, where they declared a constitutional government in an independent Greater Syria. At the Paris Peace Conference, Faisal won the support of President Woodrow Wilson.

The politics and recent history of the Middle East can seem baffling to outsiders. Nowhere was that more evident than during the Lebanon War that raged in 1982. Even contemporary reporting often made fundamental mistakes, and there was little general understanding of what was happening and why. This conflict involved a bewildering number of groups and influences from different parts of the world. The precipitating event was the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London, carried out by members of a Palestinian terrorist group.

The Road to Fatima Gate is a first-person narrative account of revolution, terrorism, and war during history's violent return to Lebanon after 15 years of quiet. Michael J. Totten's version of events in one of the most volatile countries in the world's most volatile region is one part war correspondence, one part memoir, and one part road movie.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the national best seller Ghost Wars, Steve Coll presents the story of the Bin Laden family's rise to power and privilege, revealing new information to show how American influences changed the family and how one member's rebellion changed America.

The Spymaster of Baghdad is the gripping story of the top-secret Iraqi intelligence unit that infiltrated the Islamic State. More so than that of any foreign power, the information they gathered turned the tide against the insurgency, paving the way to the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019.

This riveting narrative explores the lives of six remarkable female pharaohs, from Hatshepsut to Cleopatra - women who ruled with real power - and shines a piercing light on our own perceptions of women in power today. Female rulers are a rare phenomenon - but thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, women reigned supreme. But throughout human history, women in positions of power were more often used as political pawns in a male-dominated society. What was so special about ancient Egypt that provided women this kind of access to the highest political office?

The Papyrus of Ani is a papyrus manuscript in the form of a scroll with cursive hieroglyphs and color illustrations that was created c.1250 BCE during the 19th Dynasty of the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt.

A quarter of a century after the end of Communism swept away the ideological conflict of the "short 20th century", a new world is once again taking shape, this time in the Middle East. But what does the crisis in the region, and its refugee exodus into Europe, signify for the future of the world? And why has the noble dream of nation-building failed? Focusing mainly on religion, ideology or economics, most analysis ignored one crucial factor: asabiyyah, or group feeling, something outlined six and a half centuries ago.

This is the bizarre tale of 12 young American soldiers who are deployed to Iraq in the summer of 2006. Rather than fight the enemy in combat, the men are unexpectedly assigned to guard the country's notorious leader - Saddam Hussein - in the months leading to his execution. Living alongside and caring for their "high-value detainee" in a former palace dubbed The Rock and regularly transporting him to his raucous trial, many of the men begin questioning some of their most basic assumptions.

At the age of only 36, Sir Mark Sykes was signatory to the Sykes-Picot agreement, one of the most reviled treaties of modern times. A century later, Christopher Sykes' lively biography of his grandfather reassesses his life and work - and the political instability and violence in the Middle East attributed to it.

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region's Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924 the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to two percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. This is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia's Christian population.

Held by believers to contain the site where Abraham offered up Isaac, the place of the crucifixion of Christ and the rock from which the prophet Muhammed ascended to heaven, Jerusalem has been celebrated and revered for centuries by Jews, Christians and Muslims. Such is the symbolic power of this ancient city that its future status poses a major obstacle to a comprehensive regional peace in the Middle East.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is one of the oldest and greatest classics of Western spirituality. Until now, the available translations have treated these writings as historical curiosities that have little relevance to our contemporary situations. This new version approaches the Book of the Dead as a profound spiritual text capable of speaking to us today. Devoted like an Egyptian scribe to the principle of "effective utterance," Normandi Ellis has produced a prose translation that unfolds like pure diaphanous verse

A gripping day-by-day account of the 1978 Camp David conference, when President Jimmy Carter persuaded Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to sign the first peace treaty in the modern Middle East, one which endures to this day.

"The Lord is my shepherd." Thus begins the most beloved of all Psalms - and thus begins a thousand-year journey through the Bible. Prophets, apostles, and Jesus himself took up this image from David, reshaping it, developing it, and applying it to their own situations and needs.

This is the true story of Yasmeena, a bright and beautiful young Lebanese woman who was imprisoned in Kuwait during the first Gulf War. Yasmeena's shocking journey is a tale of the madness of war, of the sexual brutality unleashed by chaos, and of one woman’s courage to stand in danger’s way to aid her fellow sufferers.

Welcome to the Middle East conflict, a conflict that is technically 63 years old and counting but has its roots in over 2,000 years of history. With so much time and history, the peace process has become laden with unique, politically sensitive concepts, like the right of return, contiguous borders, secure borders, demilitarized zones, and security requirements, with players like the Quartet, Palestinian Authority, Fatah, Hamas, the Arab League, and Israel. Over time, it has become exceedingly difficult for even sophisticated political pundits and followers to keep track of it all.

A former member of the State Department's Policy Planning Council, Polk describes a country and a history misunderstood by many in the West. While Iranians chafe under the yolk of their current leaders, they also have bitter memories of generations of British, Russian, and American espionage, invasion, and dominance. There are important lessons to be learned from the past, and Polk teases them out of a long and rich history and shows that it is not just now, but for decades to come that an understanding of Iran will be essential to American safety and well-being.

The Book of the Dead is the name for the ancient Egyptian funerary text, which was a description of the old Egyptian conception of the afterlife. It is a collection of hymns, spells, and instructions to allow the deceased to overcome obstacles in the afterlife.