Memoir Middle East

By the son and intimate confidant of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon comes an unparalleled look at the life and work of one of the world’s most powerful leaders. “A multifaceted picture of an Israeli patriot, military leader, and family man” (Kirkus Reviews). From his youth as a soldier to his service in government, Ariel Sharon has personified Israel’s unyielding drive for security. He revolutionized the Israel Defense Forces and established the anti-terror commando Unit 101. His leadership during the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars made him a national hero....

The Exile joins Osama bin Laden as he escapes into Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, bringing to vivid life the years leading up to his death spent on the run and in exile. It tells the human story, and illuminates the global political workings. It is a tale of evasion, collusion, betrayal and the deep pain of isolation.

In this, his final work, finished only weeks before his passing, Peres offers a long-awaited examination of the crucial turning points in Israeli history through the prism of having been a decision maker and eyewitness. Told with the frankness of someone aware this would likely be his final statement, No Room for Small Dreams spans decades and events, but as much as it is about what happened, it is about why it happened.

Reviled as a fascist by his great rival Ben-Gurion, venerated by Israel’s underclass, the first Israeli to win the Nobel Peace Prize, a proud Jew but not a conventionally religious one, Menachem Begin was both complex and controversial. Born in Poland in 1913, Begin was a youthful admirer of the Revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky and soon became a leader within Jabotinsky’s Betar movement.

Few historians end up as historical actors in their own right, but Bernard Lewis has both witnessed and participated in some of the key events of the last century. When we think of the Middle East, we see it in terms that he defined and articulated.In this exceptional memoir he shares stories of his wartime service in London and Cairo, decrypting intercepts for MI6, with sometimes unexpected consequences. After the war, he was the first Western scholar ever invited into the Ottoman archives in Istanbul.

As one of the most profound and insightful scholars of the Middle East, Fouad Ajami’s sensibility was powerfully shaped by his childhood and youth in Lebanon in the ’50s and ’60s. The time was a transitional one - not only for the Middle East but for America and the world. Lebanon in this era was just coming into its own as a cosmopolitan destination of the international jet set as well as earnest American educators seeking to modernize Arab society.

Turning her back on her privileged life in Victorian England, Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), fired by her innate curiosity, journeyed the world and became fascinated with all things Arab. Traveling the length and breadth of the Arab region, armed with a love for its language and its people, she not only produced several enormously popular books based on her experiences but became instrumental to the British foreign office. When World War I erupted, and the British needed the loyalty of the Arab leaders, it was Gertrude Bell's work and connections that helped provided the brain for T. E. Lawrence's military brawn.

Ruth Elias, a Jewish woman who was taken to Auschwitz while several months pregnant, recounts her challenging and unthinkable story of confronting perhaps the most agonizing choice so that she and her newborn infant would not die. Taken for Nazi medical experimentation, she confronted the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele and saved the life of not only herself but her child as well.

Ami Ayalon seeks input and perspective from Palestinians and Israelis whose experiences differ from his own. As head of the Shin Bet security agency, he gained empathy for "the enemy" and learned that when Israel carries out anti-terrorist operations in a political context of hopelessness, the Palestinian public will support violence, because they have nothing to lose. Researching and writing Friendly Fire, he came to understand that his patriotic life had blinded him to the self-defeating nature of policies that have undermined Israel's civil society.

As a 23-year veteran of the United States Navy SEAL Teams, Ryan Zinke received two Bronze Stars for battle valor and eventually rose to command the elite members of SEAL Team Six. During his career Zinke trained and commanded many of the men who would one day run the covert operations to hunt down Osama bin Laden and save Captain Phillips ( Maersk Alabama). He also served as mentor to now famous SEALs Marcus Luttrell ( Lone Survivor) and Chris Kyle ( American Sniper).

Colonel Tiso's account offers unique insights into the challenges of planning the Iraqi campaign and the intricacies and challenges of multinational service through the lens of his assignments as a war planner at U.S. Central Command, Senior Military Adviser of the Arab Peninsula Shield Force and the Polish-led Multinational Division (Central-South), and Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations (C-3) of the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team tasked to develop the New Iraqi Army.

When she was 7, Rayya Elias and her family fled the political conflict in their native Syria, settling in Detroit. Bullied in school and caught between the world of her traditional family and her tough American classmates, she rebelled early. Elias moved to New York City to become a musician and kept herself afloat with an uncommon talent for cutting hair. At the height of the punk movement, life on the Lower East Side was full of adventure, creative inspiration, and temptation.

The Secret History, written by the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius, is one of the most extraordinary and scandalous documents to have survived from the early Byzantine period. Procopius, the leading official historian of his time, lived during the testing and indulgent time of Emperor Justinian the Great and wrote the official records of the successful wars and the grand building projects of his ruler. These were words of aggrandisement. But covertly, Procopius kept a very different record....

The life Kamila Sidiqi had known changed overnight when the Taliban seized control of the city of Kabul. After receiving a teaching degree during the civil war - a rare achievement for any Afghan woman - Kamila was subsequently banned from school and confined to her home. When her father and brother were forced to flee the city, Kamila became the sole breadwinner for her five siblings. Armed only with grit and determination, she picked up a needle and thread and created a thriving business of her own.

Leila Slimani was in her native Morocco promoting her novel Adèle, about a woman addicted to sex, when she began meeting women who confided the dark secrets of their sexual lives. In Morocco, adultery, abortion, homosexuality, prostitution, and sex outside of marriage are all punishable by law, and women have only two choices: They can be wives or virgins. Sex and Lies combines vivid, often harrowing testimonies with Slimani's passionate and intelligent commentary to make a galvanizing case for a sexual revolution in the Arab world.

In 1948, Stan Andrews left a comfortable postwar life in Los Angeles to travel to the war-torn Middle East, where a four-front Arab invasion threatened to destroy the newly-declared State of Israel. There he joined the Israeli Air Force and became one of its first fighter pilots. Andrews was an unexpected volunteer for the fight for a Jewish state. He had previously been aloof from the struggle for Jewish independence but found himself so roused by the anti-Semitism of 1940s America that he decided to go to Israel and risk everything.

A portrait of the current Israeli prime minister, one of Israel's more noticeable leaders in recent decades. Benjamin Netanyahu is currently serving his fourth term in office as prime minister of Israel, the longest serving prime minister in the country's history. Now Israeli journalist Ben Caspit puts Netanyahu's life under a magnifying glass, focusing on his last two terms in office.

The long agony of the “sick man of Europe”, an expression used by the tsar of Russia to depict the falling Ottoman Empire, could almost blind people to its incredible power and history. Preserving its mixed heritage - coming from both its geographic position, rising above the ashes of the Byzantine Empire, and the tradition inherited from the Muslim conquests - the Ottoman Empire lasted more than six centuries.

From the former editor in chief of Haaretz, the first in-depth, comprehensive biography of Ariel Sharon, the most dramatic and imposing Israeli political and military leader of the last forty years. The life of Ariel Sharon spans much of modern Israel’s history. A commander in the Israeli Army from its inception in 1948, Sharon participated in the 1948 War of Independence, played decisive roles in the 1956 Suez War and the Six-Day War of 1967, and is credited here with the shift in the outcome of the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

There are many reasons why it might seem unwise to walk, mostly alone, through the Middle East. That, in part, is exactly why Leon McCarron did it. From Jerusalem, McCarron followed a series of wild hiking trails that trace ancient trading and pilgrimage routes and traverse some of the most contested landscapes in the world. In the West Bank, he met families struggling to lead normal lives amidst political turmoil and had a surreal encounter with the world's oldest and smallest religious sect.