Best Middle Eastern Politics

“One of the very best books to come out of the war in Iraq,” (Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, bestselling author of On Killing ), The Last Punisher is a gripping and intimate on-the-ground memoir from a Navy SEAL who was part of SEAL Team THREE with American Sniper Chris Kyle. “A rare glimpse into the mind of a Navy SEAL,” (Clint Emerson, New York Times bestselling author of 100 Deadly Skills ) Kevin Lacz brings you onto the battlefield and relays the tough realities of war. An instant classic that will be of enormous value to future warriors, scholars, and anyone who cares about our military and our veterans.”. (Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, bestselling author of On Killing). "[Lacz's] pungent, plain-spoken account has lots of butt-kicking and some tears, and serves to remind civilian readers again that war is another world...an unapologetic tribute to the habits and attitudes of the professional warriors of SEAL Team THREE...a late but worthy arrival to the Navy SEAL memoir genre." The finest story of a SEAL team in combat: alternately violent, thoughtful, funny and raw. Serving with the elite Navy Seals, Kevin faced bullets and bombs to stop terrorists from coming toward us. In The Last Punisher, Kevin tells his story in a compelling and earthy way that brings the challenges of the soldier to every page. "A remarkable tribute to the power of teamwork and a rare honest glimpse into a brotherhood where the stakes are life and death. (John Rocker, retired Major League Baseball pitcher and director of public affairs for Save Homeless Veterans).

From King David to the 21st century, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the epic history of three thousand years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism, and coexistence.

In this compelling and evocative memoir, we accompany Mekhennet as she journeys behind the lines of jihad, starting in the German neighborhoods where the 9/11 plotters were radicalized and the Iraqi neighborhoods where Sunnis and Shia turned against one another, and culminating on the Turkish/Syrian border region where ISIS is a daily presence. In her travels across the Middle East and North Africa, she documents her chilling run-ins with various intelligence services and shows why the Arab Spring never lived up to its promise. A Washington Post 2017 Best Book, Guardian Best Politics Book of 2017, Christian Science Monitor Best Book of 2017, Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book of 2017, and. Minnesota Public Radio Best Book to Give and Get: Nonfiction Picks of 2017. "― Chicago Review of Books "Souad Mekhennet delivers a brilliant narrative of risky first-person interviews and encounters across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe"― Elle " A much-needed cry of tough, informed humanism, needed now more than ever. "― Christian Science Monitor " At the top of my list: I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad by Souad Mekhennet, a courageous Muslim journalist who risks her life to get the truth from ISIS leaders." "This excellent book is full of unexpected insights into the hazards of covering one of the defining issues of our age and the mechanics of Islamist terror and radicalization...Mekhennet’s clear compassion, a sterling quality for a journalist, means that the book offers real insight alongside a captivating, thriller-style read. "― Bookish "In her new book, I Was Told To Come Alone , [Mekhennet] combines memoir with in-depth stories about her reporting to create a complex portrait of identity, conflict and ideology... "A riveting memoir and a literary bombshell that effectively eviscerates every preconception, misconception, and prejudice readers have about the Arab world, I Was Told To Come Alone reinforces the singular significance of journalism, especially foreign journalism, at a time when it is facing its greatest challenges...Fearless prose that reveals bracing truths...Compelling, insightful, and shockingly relevant, Mekhennet's chronicle is a must-read and nothing less than a revelation. ― Kirkus Reviews "Riveting memoir.... in I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad, [Souad Mekhennet] brings the reader along on her harrowing travels through war-torn corners of the world giving a human face to people often lost behind the headlines. If you want to truly understand the nature of the crisis facing the West in the twenty-first century, this is the place to start.”― Joby Warrick , Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS “ I Was Told to Come Alone reads like a thriller, as Souad Mekhennet takes us on a journey into the heart of the Muslim world. “If only every journalist with Souad Mekhennet’s culture-straddling perspective and access would write an incisive book like this.

Award-winning journalist Jim Krane charts the history of Dubai from its earliest days, considers the influence of the family who has ruled it since the nineteenth century, and looks at the effect of the global economic downturn on a place that many tout as a blueprint for a more stable Middle East. In City of Gold, Jim Krane, who reported for the AP from Dubai, brings us a boots-on-the-ground look at this fascinating place by walking its streets, talking to its business titans, its prostitutes, and the hard-bitten men who built its fanciful skyline. While many think Dubai's glory days have passed, insiders like Jim Krane who got to know the city and its creators firsthand realize there's much more to come in the City of Gold, a place that, in just a few years, has made itself known to nearly every person on earth. Krane systematically tackles pretty much every important aspect of Dubai's past and present, with absorbing accounts of the city's history and the personalities and achievements of its charismatic rulers through to vexed contemporary issues such as human-rights abuses and environmental concerns, condensing a vast amount of detail into a compellingly readable roller coaster of a narrative.” ―The Rough Guide to Dubai. There is no better book about Dubai, and there may never be.” ―Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at CSIS, author of The Vital Triangle: China, the United States, and the Middle East. In City of Gold, Jim Krane traces the fascinating and long overlooked history of Dubai, from pirate battles and eccentric British explorers to the glittering spires of a metropolis that emerged from nowhere, in prose as spare and enchanting as a desert fairy tale.” ―James Hider, Middle East correspondent for The Times (London), author of The Spiders of Allah: Travels of an Unbeliever on the Frontline of Holy War. Jim Krane has written a fascinating account of a Middle East we rarely get to hear about. Jim Krane's book on Dubai's rise and fall--in this era of global financial crisis--is a cautionary tale for us all.” ―Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR's Middle East correspondent".

In a thrilling dramatic narrative, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Joby Warrick traces how the strain of militant Islam behind ISIS first arose in a remote Jordanian prison and spread with the unwitting aid of two American presidents. In Black Flags, an unprecedented character-driven account of the rise of ISIS, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joby Warrick shows how the zeal of this one man and the strategic mistakes of Presidents Bush and Obama led to the banner of ISIS being raised over huge swaths of Syria and Iraq. “Gripping … Mr. Warrick has a gift for constructing narratives with a novelistic energy and detail, and in this volume, he creates the most revealing portrait yet laid out in a book of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the founding father of the organization that would become the Islamic State … For readers interested in the roots of the Islamic State and the evil genius of its godfather, there is no better book to begin with than Black Flags .” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “Warrick charts Zarqawi’s rise from booze-swilling Jordanian street tough to one of the most brutal jihadists in the world. “A revealing, riveting and exquisitely detailed account of the life and death of Zarqawi, the improbable terrorist mastermind, and the rise of the movement now known as the Islamic State (also known as ISIS).” — San Francisco Chronicle. "A detailed, step-by-step narrative demonstrating how repeated miscalculations by the United States, Arab leaders and al-Qaeda wound up empowering the Islamic State ... Black Flags provides answers in this still-unfolding history of what happens when religious radicals try to outdo one another for the mantle of God’s favorite." Black Flags is an invaluable guide to an unfolding tragedy that must be understood before it can be ended.” —Lawrence Wright, author of Thirteen Days in September and The Looming Tower “Joby Warrick is one of America's leading national security reporters, so it's no surprise that Black Flags is the most deeply reported and well-written account we have about ISIS and its terrorist army.” —Peter Bergen, author of Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad “Joby Warrick weaves Black Flags with the tradecraft of a spy, the mind of an investigative reporter, and the pen of a novelist. We should all thank Warrick for telling a hard truth the government will not want to hear: how U.S. policies helped give birth to the so-called Islamic State.” —Dana Priest, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter and author of Top Secret America “Drawing on his unrivaled sources and access, Joby Warrick has written a profoundly important and groundbreaking book, one that reads like a novel, riveting from the first page to the last. No book better explains the miscalculations, wrong turns, and bad luck that led to the rise of ISIS.” —Rick Atkinson, author of The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 “[A] crisply written, chilling account … Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Warrick confidently weaves a cohesive narrative from an array of players—American officials, CIA officers, Jordanian royalty and security operatives, religious figures, and terrorists—producing an important geopolitical overview with the grisly punch of true-crime nonfiction … The author focuses on dramatic flashpoints and the roles of key players, creating an exciting tale with a rueful tone, emphasizing how the Iraq invasion's folly birthed ISIS and created many missed opportunities to stop al-Zarqawi quickly.” — Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) “Joby Warrick has written a penetrating and fascinating look at the birth and evolution of the world’s most violent terrorist network, ISIS, or ISIL.

Untangling Yemen’s history before examining the country’s role in both al-Qaeda and the wider jihadist movement today, Clark presents a lively, clear, and up-to-date account of a little-known state whose chronic instability is increasingly engaging the general reader. The author illustrates her analysis with a string of vignettes drawn from her intrepid journeys into the remotest parts of the country . "An experienced foreign correspondent casts a timely light on the complex fissiparous, impoverished country now seen as a haven for Al-Qaeda. " Dancing on the Heads of Snakes makes. Yemen’s history and contemporary affairs accessible to the general reader. Clark tracks Yemen’s turbulent past and unstable present with a light touch, combining historical travelogue with investigative reportage. Dancing on the Heads of Snakes is a commendable addition to the canon of literature on Yemen and does what many previous books have failed to do: open up knowledge of a complex and often forgotten country to a much wider audience. "Untangling Yemen’s history before examining the country’s role in both Al Qaeda and the wider jihadist movement today, [Victoria Clark] presents an up-to-date account of a state that ought to be better known. The text, backed by numerous references and an excellent bibliography, will engage even those readers who are unacquainted with Yemen, its history and today’s complexities. She now works as a freelance journalist and writer, contributing to the Independent , Prospect magazine, and the Tablet.

Stunning photography pairs with informative and personal text by the wife of the most recent United States ambassador to Qatar to give Westerners traveling to Qatar on business or for World Cup preparations an inside understanding of this moderate Muslim country and the way it attempts to become modern and engaged with the world without losing its heritage. Diana Untermeyer worked in the White House during the George H. W. Bush administration and at the Christ Church Cathedral in Houston before moving to Qatar as the ambassador's wife.

Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to the ongoing intifada , is a direct consequence of those six days of fighting. Writing with a novelist’s command of narrative and a historian’s grasp of fact and motive, Michael B. Oren reconstructs both the lightning-fast action on the battlefields and the political shocks that electrified the world. Extraordinary personalities—Moshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser, Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin—rose and toppled from power as a result of this war; borders were redrawn; daring strategies brilliantly succeeded or disastrously failed in a matter of hours. A towering work of history and an enthralling human narrative, Six Days of War is the most important book on the Middle East conflict to appear in a generation. [Oren] has woven a seamless narrative out of a staggering variety of diplomatic and military strands.” —The New York Times. “With a remarkably assured style, Oren elucidates nearly every aspect of the conflict. “[In] Michael Oren’s richly detailed and lucid account, the familiar story is thrilling once again. [Oren’s] narrative is precise but written with great literary flair. This is the most complete history to date of the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel entered and began its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. While no account can be definitive until Arab archives open, Oren, a Princeton-trained senior fellow at Jerusalem's Shalem Center who has served as director of Israel's department of inter-religious affairs and as an adviser to Israel's U.N. delegation, utilizes newly available archival sources and a spectrum of interviews with participants, including many Arabs, to fill gaps and correct misconceptions. Further, Six Days of War is an attack on "post-Zionism": the school of politics and history that casts Israel as the author of policies that intentionally promote the destuction of Palestine as a separate entity and of Palestinians as a people, not least through the occupation that began with the 1967 War. About the nature of Israeli policy since the war, the book says little, but finds that "for all its military conquests, Israel was still incapable of imposing the peace it craved." Many books, e.g., Ahron Bregman's Israel's War: 1947-1993, Tibi Bassam's Conflict and War in the Middle East, 1967-91, and Eric Hammel's Six Days in June, cover a broader period, rely heavily on analysis, or fall short of objectivity.

While the Americans were fighting in Vietnam, a struggle of even greater strategic significance was taking place in the Middle East: the Sultanate of Oman guards the entrance to the Arabian Gulf, and thus controls the movement of oil from that region. Ian Gardiner is a historian and author.

Published with a new afterword from the author―the classic, bestselling account of how the modern Middle East was created. “Wonderful...No book published in recent years has more lasting relevance to our understanding of the Middle East.” ― Jack Miles, Los Angeles Book Review.