You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
My Story tells the tale of one man's coming to adulthood in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Because of his international focus, the Author had said little about a subject that might interest a reader familiar with his existing body of work, that is, himself. So, he has turned a penetrating gaze from his customary subjects--people and places in the Middle East and South Asia--to a subject that provides context for his earlier books. From family histories of eighteenth-century Cevio in the Swiss Alps and Marseille in Provence; from childhood, youth, adolescence, and early adulthood in the United States; to the Navy and the Vietnam War; from "First Footsteps in the Middle East" to "Timeline," "Red America," and "Iran Odyssey," these chapters play out against the backdrop of the family history now provided. As such, this work represents the capstone to a full career.
My Story tells the tale of one man’s coming to adulthood in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Because of his international focus, the Author had said little about a subject that might interest a reader familiar with his existing body of work, that is, himself. So, he has turned a penetrating gaze from his customary subjects—people and places in the Middle East and South Asia—to a subject that provides context for his earlier books. From family histories of eighteenth-century Cevio in the Swiss Alps and Marseille in Provence; from childhood, youth, adolescence, and early adulthood in the United States; to the Navy and the Vietnam War; from “First Footsteps in the Middle East” to “Timeline,” “Red America,” and “Iran Odyssey,” these chapters play out against the backdrop of the family history now provided. As such, this work represents the capstone to a full career.
Middle East Tapestry represents the final installment of my thirty-plus years living and working in the Arab and Muslim worlds. The previous works, Masr and At the Margins, covered outlying areas of the region, including Egypt, South Asia, and West Africa. This book marks a return to the central lands of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula, including Saudi Arabia and Yemen, with lengthy excursions into lands to the north, chiefly Jordan and the West Bank. The title, Middle East Tapestry, was chosen after careful consideration of several alternatives. The term "Middle East" simply seemed the best descriptor of the area inhabited by the world's nearly four hundred million Arab Muslims and makes up ...
Visitors have often remarked on the light of Egypt. There is something about the soft diffusion of sunlight in the country that makes it visually special. Beginning in the early nineteenth century a combination of that light and the new, more sensitive technology of lithography conspired together to allow artists to capture with unprecedented fidelity the country's monuments, Pharaonic as well as Islamic. But there is another way in which the word "light" captures the reality of Egypt. In Arabic it is said that the blood of a people is either "light" or "heavy." Where the blood of others in the region could be said to be heavy, that of the Egyptians is emphatically light and it always seems to have been that way. Here, the word serves as a proxy for "cheerful" or "optimistic." The book that follows captures some of that fundamental Egyptian buoyancy and optimism, and it was not very hard to do. The attitude is infectious and anyone who has lived for any length of time in the country is in danger of succumbing. The pieces reflect a sometimes wry, occasionally humorous, but always affectionate view of an essentially unchanging Egypt.
With the aim to write the history of Christianity in Scandinavia with Jerusalem as a lens, this book investigates the image – or rather the imagination – of Jerusalem in the religious, political, and artistic cultures of Scandinavia through most of the second millennium. Volume 3 analyses the impact of Jerusalem on Scandinavian Christianity from the middle of the 18. century in a broad context. Tracing the Jerusalem Code in three volumes Volume 1: The Holy City Christian Cultures in Medieval Scandinavia (ca. 1100–1536) Volume 2: The Chosen People Christian Cultures in Early Modern Scandinavia (1536–ca. 1750) Volume 3: The Promised Land Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–ca. 1920)
When Roger H. Guichard Jr. discovered a French translation of the works of Carsten Niebuhr, sole survivor of the 1761-1767 Royal Danish Expedition to the Yemen, he was astounded. 'They were not just another dry account of one man's travels, but represented the record of a serious intellectual enterprise involving Enlightenment science, sacred philology, the Bible as history, 'Orientalism', Egyptology, and discovery'. Having translated them from French to English, and then cross-referenced his translations with the original German texts, 'Niebuhr in Egypt' is not, as one might expect, simply a presentation of his translation. Instead Guichard offers his readers an account of the expedition's year in Egypt, with lengthy excursions into the several subplots- Enlightenment science, the Bible as history, and Egyptology - that he found so engaging in the original works. This is not a scholarly work but would appeal to anyone with an interest in any of the areas mentioned or simply to anyone interested in this country's past and present.
This book retrieves from the archives people, places and perspectives normally overlooked to tell an original and expansive history of the Qatar Peninsula, paying close attention to landscape and the natural world. The arc of the book moves geographically through the landscape and chronologically through selected sources, drawing on digitised maps, manuscripts, hydrographic surveys, government records, traveller accounts, early photographs, archaeological and ethnographic reports. While these are standard sources recruited by Qatar to tell its own singular, streamlined history, this book is a subversive reading of those sources. It braids together elusive and precarious stories – difficult...
Despite having the highest rates of cannabis use in the continent, France enforces the most repressive laws against the drug in all of Europe. Perhaps surprisingly, France was once the epicentre of a global movement to medicalize cannabis, specifically hashish, in the treatment of disease. In Taming Cannabis David Guba examines how nineteenth-century French authorities routinely blamed hashish consumption, especially among Muslim North Africans, for behaviour deemed violent and threatening to the social order. This association of hashish with violence became the primary impetus for French pharmacists and physicians to tame the drug and deploy it in the homeopathic treatment of mental illness...
The fast-paced and “engrossing account” (The New York Times Book Review) of “one of the greatest breakthroughs in archaeological history” (The Christian Science Monitor): two rival geniuses in a race to decode the writing on one of the world’s most famous documents—the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous objects in the world, attracting millions of visitors to the British museum every year, and yet most people don’t really know what it is. Discovered in a pile of rubble in 1799, this slab of stone proved to be the key to unlocking a lost language that baffled scholars for centuries. Carved in ancient Egypt, the Rosetta Stone carried the same message in di...