The Modern Middle East: A Political History since the First World War
Mehran Kamrava sets the stage with a concise discussion of the evolution of
Islam and the religion's profound role in the region. He then looks at, in
turn, the rise and fall of the Ottomans, the trials of independence and
state-building, the emergence and fiery spread of nationalism, the two Arab-Israeli
wars of 1967 and 1973, the Iranian Revolution, and the two Gulf Wars and
beyond, including discussion of the invasion of Iraq by the United States.
After tracing the consequences of these historical events for a host of
political phenomena, Kamrava gives detailed attention to three pivotal issues:
the challenges of economic development, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and
the question of democracy. He also examines issues that will shape the future:
population growth, environmental pollution, and water scarcity.
The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova
If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into
crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth
Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller
The Historian.
The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a
medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's
library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a
dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate
successor." When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly
confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier,
in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his
office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that
Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in
the mid-15th century--was still alive. The story turns out to concern
our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a
fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his
mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows
almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears
also.
The Class The Class is
Erich Segal's 6th novel, his best-loved work, published in
1985. “The Class” is the
Harvard Class of 1958 and in particular, refers to five members of this class: Andrew Eliot, Jason Gilbert, Theodore Lambros, Daniel Rossi and George Keller.
