Beirut
10 best books like Beirut (Samir Kassir): Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon, Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place, Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone), Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship, The Space between Us: Social Geography and Politics, Lost Chicago, Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex
Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean
| Author | Philip Mansel |
| ISBN | 0300172648 |
Levant is a book of cities. It describes three former centers of great wealth, pleasure, and freedom—Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut—cities of the Levant region along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In these key ports at the crossroads of East and West, against all expectations, cosmopolitanism...
Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon
| Author | Robert Fisk |
| ISBN | 1560254424 |
With the Israeli-Palestinian crisis reaching wartime levels, where is the latest confrontation between these two old foes leading? Robert Fisk's explosive Pity the Nation recounts Sharon and Arafat's first deadly encounter in Lebanon in the early 1980s and explains why the Israel–Palestine...
| Author | Susan Wittig Albert |
| ISBN | 0292719701 |
What does it mean to belong to a place, to be truly rooted and grounded in the place you call home? How do you commit to a marriage, to a full partnership with another person, and still maintain your own separate identity? These questions have been central to Susan Wittig Albert's life, and in this beautifully...
Let’s start with two truths about our era that are so inescapable as to have become clichés: We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive....
| Author | James Attlee |
| ISBN | 0241144329 |
One of our favourite travel books of the past decade was James Attlee's debut, Isolarion, a journey around the author's own Oxford neighbourhood, published to acclaim by the University of Chicago Press. In this follow-up, Nocturne, the author starts again outside his own front door, but this time...
Although many Americans consider the establishment of the colonies as the birth of this country, in fact Early America already existed long before the arrival of the Europeans. From coast to coast, Native Americans had created enduring cultures, and the subsequent European invasion remade much...
In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the...
The Space Between Us brings the connection between geography, psychology, and politics to life. By going into the neighborhoods of real cities, Enos shows how our perceptions of racial, ethnic, and religious groups are intuitively shaped by where these groups live and interact daily. Through the...
| Author | David Garrard Lowe |
| ISBN | 0823028712 |
30th Anniversary
These dazzling, poignant pages recreate the magical built environment that thrilled generations of Chicago residents and visitors alike before falling victim to the wrecking ball of “progress.”
Here are the grand residences and hotels, opulent theaters,...
| Author | Amy T. Schalet |
| ISBN | 0226736199 |
For American parents, teenage sex is something to be feared and forbidden: most would never consider allowing their children to have sex at home, and sex is a frequent source of family conflict. In the Netherlands, where teenage pregnancies are far less frequent than in the United States, parents aim...
الواحد يصير خفيفاً عند بلوغه هذه الأنحاء. يعطي قدرات. يفقد آلامه الجسمانية. في أحد الممرات رأيت الحريري قاعداً عشرين ورقة، وكلما انتهى منها عاد يقرأها من...
Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation
| Author | Ashraf Khalil |
| ISBN | 1250006694 |
A definitive, absorbing account of the Egyptian revolution, written by a Cairo-based Egyptian-American reporter for Foreign Policy and The Times (London), who witnessed firsthand Mubarak's demise and the country's efforts to build a democracy
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In early 2011, the world’s...
Chaos and Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East
| Author | Patrick Cockburn |
| ISBN | 1682190285 |
“One of the best informed on-the-ground journalists. He was almost always correct on Iraq.” —Sidney Blumenthal in an email to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
“Quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq today.” —Seymour Hersh
“Has anyone...
Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution
| Author | John R. Bradley |
| ISBN | 1403984778 |
The government of Egypt banned Inside Egypt in 2008—the first time a book on Egyptian politics had been banned in the country in decades—and quickly rescinded it after the media firestorm that followed. The book depicts the country before the collapse, and then explores recent events in Egypt...
Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression
| Author | Dale Maharidge |
| ISBN | 0520274512 |
In Someplace Like America, writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael S. Williamson take us to the working-class heart of America, bringing to life—through shoe leather reporting, memoir, vivid stories, stunning photographs, and thoughtful analysis—the deepening crises of poverty...
Common People: The History of An English Family
| Author | Alison Light |
| ISBN | 1905490380 |
Family history is a massive phenomenon of our times but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond.
Epic in...
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel
| Author | Michael J. Totten |
| ISBN | 1594035210 |
The Road to Fatima Gate is a first-person narrative account of revolution, terrorism, and war during history's violent return to Lebanon after fifteen 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,...
A History of Modern Lebanon
| Author | Fawwaz Traboulsi |
| ISBN | 0745324371 |
This is the first comprehensive history of Lebanon in the modern period. It is entirely unique as the last history of Lebanon was published more than forty years ago. Written by a leading Lebanese scholar and based on previously inaccessible archives, it is a fascinating and beautifully-written account...
A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered
| Author | Kamal Salibi |
| ISBN | 0520071964 |
Today Lebanon is one of the world's most divided countries. But paradoxically the faction-ridden Lebanese, both Christians and Muslims, have never shown a keener consciousness of common identity. How can this be? In the light of modern scholarship, a famous Lebanese writer and scholar examines...
| Author | Hanan Al-Shaykh |
| ISBN | 0385473826 |
With the acclaim won by her first two novels, Hanan al-Shaykh established herself as the Arab world's foremost woman writer. Beirut Blues, published to similar acclaim, further confirms her place in Arabic literature, and brings her writing to a new, groundbreaking level.
The daring fragmented...
| Author | Elias Khoury |
| ISBN | 0312427166 |
The slow and painful reading of this book was an unsettling experience that is to the author's credit. Focused on the war that erupted in the streets of Beirut in the 1970s and the changes this wreaks on three different characters, it is the perhaps the best I have read about warfare in giving the reader...
Destroying A Nation: The Civil War in Syria
| Author | Nikolaos van Dam |
| ISBN | 1784537977 |
Following the Arab Spring, Syria descended into civil and sectarian conflict. It has since become a fractured warzone which operates as a breeding ground for new terrorist movements including ISIS as well as the root cause of the greatest refugee crisis in modern history. In this book, former Special...
Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine
| Author | Sami Adwan |
| ISBN | 1595586830 |
In 2000, a group of Israeli and Palestinian teachers gathered to address what to many people seemed an unbridgeable gulf between the two societies. Struck by how different the standard Israeli and Palestinian textbook histories of the same events were from one another, they began to explore how to...
Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran
Is psychoanalysis possible in the Islamic Republic of Iran? This is the question that Gohar Homayounpour poses to herself, and to us, at the beginning of this memoir of displacement, nostalgia, love, and pain. Twenty years after leaving her country, Homayounpour, an Iranian, Western-trained psychoanalyst,...
| Author | Isabelle Eberhardt |
| ISBN | 0720611911 |
In the Shadow of Islam is an extraordinary evocation of the desert and its people by a woman who dressed as a man in order to travel alone and unimpeded throughout North Africa. In 1897 Isabelle Eberhardt, age 20, left an already unconventional life in Geneva for the Morroccan frontier. Gripped by spiritual...
