Biography Middle East

Most Americans think of the Taliban and al Qaeda as a bunch of bearded fanatics fighting an Islamic crusade from caves in Afghanistan. But that doesn't explain their astonishing comeback along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Why is it that eight years after we invaded Afghanistan, the CIA says that these groups are better armed and better funded than ever? Seeds of Terror will reshape the way you think about America's enemies, revealing them less as ideologues and more as criminals.

Malala Yousafzai was a girl who loved to learn but was told that girls would no longer be allowed to go to school. She wrote a blog that called attention to what was happening in her beautiful corner of Pakistan and realized that words can bring about change. She has continued to speak out for the right of all children to have an education. In 2014, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

This book tells the stories of the Muslims, Christians, Jews and others who made a courageous stand against the mass slaughter of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, the first modern genocide. Foreigners and Ottomans alike ran considerable risks to bear witness and rescue victims, sometimes sacrificing their lives. Diplomats, humanitarians, missionaries, lawyers and other visitors to the Empire stood up, including Tolstoy's daughter, Alexandra; Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who first established genocide as an international crime; and the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen.

From 1951 to 1967 Egypt pursued a secret program to build military rockets that could have conceivably posed a threat to neighboring Israel. Because such an ambitious project required Western expertise, the Egyptian leader President Nasser hired West German scientists, many of them veterans of the Nazi rocket program at Peenemünde and elsewhere. These covert plans soon came to the attention of Israel’s legendary secret service, Mossad, and caused deep alarm in Tel Aviv.

A few weeks after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, journalist Megan K. Stack, a 25-year-old national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, was thrust into Afghanistan and Pakistan, dodging gunmen and prodding warlords for information. From there, she traveled to war-ravaged Iraq and Lebanon and other countries scarred by violence, witnessing the changes that swept the Muslim world and laboring to tell its stories.

Suleiman the Magnificent: The Life and Legacy of the Ottoman Empire’s Most Famous Sultan chronicles Suleiman’s life and accomplishments and the massive impact he had on his empire and the world around him.

A gold medal wrestler, Reza's inspiring life celebrates honor, family and freedom. After he leads bloody battles in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and serves in the Air Force, Reza desires a fate beyond the suffocating suppression of Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. On the last night of the 1982 Military World Wrestling Championships, he grips his gold medal, knowing American wrestlers wait minutes away to help him defect.

Henry Kissinger is among the most controversial figures in American life. He has been lauded as a diplomatic Superman and cursed as a war criminal, credited with turning the tide of the Cold War and accused of causing genocide. At various times, he has inspired both admiration and deep suspicion among the American public.

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.

A well-known novelist and journalist from the coastal city of Jableh, Samar Yazbek witnessed the beginning four months of the Syrian uprising first-hand and actively participated in a variety of public actions and budding social movements. With rare empathy and journalistic prowess Samar Yazbek compiled oral testimonies from ordinary Syrians all over the country. Filled with snapshots of exhilarating hope and horrifying atrocities, she offers us a wholly unique perspective on the Syrian uprising.

The Endless Country takes a journey through Turkey’s past – the nation the author’s father left decades ago and he returns to as a young man. It is not about Erdogan or Atatürk, the two towering Presidents who have book-ended that history, and at times have appeared impossible to escape. Instead Sami Kent’s book goes deep beyond them, revealing a history as rich, layered and absurd as his family’s favourite dessert, künefe: a shredded wheat pastry with a core of melted cheese, a topping of pistachios, and a drowning of syrup.

Dubai wunderkind Michelle Rasul was only a toddler when she first got behind the turntables. By the time she entered the 2021 DMC Global DJing Championship, she was on her way to becoming an international celebrity. Her inspiring autobiography is a testament to passion, talent, family, love, and perseverance—and above all, a celebration of Girl Power with some scratching and a beat.

In Lives Between the Lines, Michael Vatikiotis traces the journey of his Greek and Italian forebears from Tuscany, Crete, Hydra and Rhodes, as they made their way to Egypt and the coast of Palestine in search of opportunity. In the process, he reveals a period where the Middle East was a place of ethnic and cultural harmony—where Arabs and Jews rubbed shoulders in bazaars and teashops, intermarried and shared family history.

Sulla base di una conoscenza diretta delle fonti e dell'ormai sterminata bibliografia di lingua tedesca e italiana, l'autore traccia un profilo dell'imperatore normanno-svevo Federico II (1194-1250), una delle figure più discusse del Medioevo europeo. Il volume è suddiviso in tre parti: la prima è dedicata alla storia politica di Federico, segnata dalla lotta con il Papato e i Comuni; la seconda si occupa dell'uomo, della sua sfera famigliare, dei suoi interessi filosofici e scientifici, e del suo entourage di cui facevano parte anche studiosi ebraici e arabi; la terza segue la formazione del mito di Federico attraverso i secoli fino ai giorni nostri.

The "Lackawanna Six" were young men, born of Yemeni families long settled in upstate New York, who took a trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan and spent time in an al-Qaeda training camp long before the specter of 9/11, before most people had even heard of Osama Bin Laden, and before the existence of the Homeland Security Act.

This is not a book about Iraq's history, nor an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have spun out over the past twenty years, though both wars and history are part of its narrative, from the American invasion to the Arab Spring, ISIS and beyond. This is the story of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniac leader who shaped the state in his own image. Then one day, after yet another war, a foreign army invaded, toppled the leader, destroyed the state, and proceeded to invent a new country.

Gamal Abdel Nasser has been called many things. The father of modern-day Egypt. The founder of Arab nationalism. The leader of the Egyptian Revolution. The second president of the Egyptian Republic. The creator of his own brand of political and social governance - Nasserism. Anthony Eden, the former British prime minister, called him the "Mussolini of the Nile".

At the age of only 36, Sir Mark Sykes was signatory to the Sykes-Picot agreement, one of the most reviled treaties of modern times. A century later, Christopher Sykes' lively biography of his grandfather reassesses his life and work - and the political instability and violence in the Middle East attributed to it.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, the larger-than-life Egyptian president who ruled for eighteen years from the coup d'etat he led in 1952, is best known for wresting the Suez Canal from the British and French empires and befriending such iconic revolutionaries as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Yet there is a darker side to Nasser's regime. He was a brutal authoritarian, whose legacy lies at the heart of the violent and repressive order that still prevails throughout the Arab world today. In We Are Your Soldiers, Alex Rowell focuses on seven countries to reassess Nasser's impact in the Arab sphere.

Here is a comprehensive account of the rise of bin Laden. In meticulous detail, world-renowned terrorism expert Yossef Bodansky uncovers the events in bin Laden's life that turned the once-promising engineering student into a cold-blooded leader of radical Islam. In the process, Bodansky reveals a chilling story that is as current as today's headlines but as ancient as the Crusades, a story that transcends bin Laden and any other single man. This book is a sobering wake-up call.