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Beirut is a tour de force that takes the reader from the ancient to the modern world, offering a dazzling panorama of the city's Seleucid, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French incarnations. Kassir vividly describes Beirut's spectacular growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concentrating on its emergence after the Second World War as a cosmopolitan capital until its near destruction during the devastating Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. --from publisher description.
Beirut is a tour de force that takes the reader from the ancient to the modern world, offering a dazzling panorama of the city's Seleucid, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French incarnations. Kassir vividly describes Beirut's spectacular growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concentrating on its emergence after the Second World War as a cosmopolitan capital until its near destruction during the devastating Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. --from publisher description.
Not since Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem in 1989 has a journalist offered such a poignant and passionate portrait of Lebanon—a uniquely pluralist Arab country struggling to defend its viability in a turbulent and treacherous Middle East. Michael Young, who was taken to Lebanon at age seven by his Lebanese mother after the death of his American father and who has worked most of his career as a journalist there for American publications, brings to life a country in the crossfire of invasions, war, domestic division, incessant sectarian scheming, and often living in fear of its neighbors. Young knows or has known many of the players, politicians, writers, and religious leaders. ...
Before his assassination in 2005, Samir Kassir was one of Lebanon’s foremost public intellectuals. In Being Arab, a thought-provoking assessment of Arab identity, he calls on the people of the Middle East to reject both Western double standards and Islamism in order to take the future into their own hands. Passionately written and brilliantly argued, this rallying cry for change has now been heard by millions.
Across a range of settings - from the dry river valleys of Yemen to tropical high-rise fabric of Singapore - the projects selected for the 10th cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture match the cutting-edge design with a deep commitment to place. Resolutely contemporary and yet firmly local, they respond to the challenges of their environments with imagination and skill. "Intervention Architecture" brings these works vividly to life through understanding photographs as well as drawings and descriptions. Texts by leading thinkers and practitioners explore the broader issues raised by the projects, from ecological urbanism to cosmopolitanism in architecture.
Exploring visual culture, design and politics in 1960s Beirut, this compelling interdisciplinary study examines a critical period in Lebanon's history.
4.25 am, 5 August 1962, West Los Angeles Police Department ‘Marilyn Monroe has died of an overdose’, a man’s voice says dully. And when the stunned policeman asked ‘What?’, the same voice struggled to repeat ‘Marilyn Monroe has died. She has committed suicide.’ If life were scripted like the movies, this extraordinary phone call would have been made by the most important man in Marilyn Monroe’s life – Dr Ralph Greenson, her final psychoanalyst. During her last years Marilyn had come to rely on Greenson more and more. She met with him almost every day. He was her analyst, her friend and her confessor. He was the last person to see her alive, and the first to see her dead. In this highly acclaimed novel, Marilyn’s last years – and her last sessions on Dr Greenson’s couch – are brilliantly recreated. This is the story of the world’s most famous and elusive actress, and the world she inhabited, surrounded by such figures as Arthur Miller, Truman Capote and John Huston. It is a remarkable piece of storytelling that illuminates one of the greatest icons of the twentieth century.
This edited volume examines the current challenges to media freedom and democratisation in the Middle East. The book revisits the relationship between media consumption and activism in the region, providing thorough analyses on the appropriation of social media for political engagement. Since the outburst and spread of what was known as the ‘Arab Uprisings’ in 2010, the political and media landscapes in the Middle East region have dramatically changed. The initial hope for democratic change and governance quality improvements has faded, as several regimes in the Middle East have strengthened their repressive tactics toward voices deemed critical of governments’ practices, including jou...
The English-language debut of 2012’sInternational Arabic Fiction Prize winner A complex thriller, The Mehlis Report introduces English readers to a highly talented Arabic writer. When former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri is killed by a massive bomb blast, the U.N. appoints German judge Detlev Mehlisto conduct an investigation of the attack — while explosions continue to rock Beirut. Mehlis’s report is eagerly awaited by the entire Lebanese population. First we meet Saman Yarid, a middle-aged architect who wanders the tense streets of Beirut and, like everyone else in the city, can’t stop thinking about the pending report. Saman’s sister Josephine, who was kidnapped in 1983,narrates the second part of The Mehlis Report: Josephine is dead, yet exists in a bizarre underworld in the bowels of Beirut where the dead are busy writing their memoirs. Then the ghost of Hariri himself appears…
-- A stunning history of Lebanon over five centuries --"Skillfully weaving together social, political, cultural and economic history, this deeply informed and penetrating study provides a rich understanding of the vibrant, tragic, but ever hopeful Leban