History Middle

From the best-selling author of The Templars, Dan Jones' epic new history tells nothing less than the story of how the world we know today came to be built. Across 16 chapters, blending Dan Jones' trademark gripping narrative style with authoritative analysis, Powers and Thrones shows how, at each stage in this story, successive Western powers thrived by attracting - or stealing - the most valuable resources, ideas and people from the rest of the world.

More than 20 years have elapsed since the United States last brokered a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. In that time, three presidents have tried and failed. Martin Indyk - a former United States ambassador to Israel and special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2013 - has experienced these political frustrations and disappointments firsthand.

In Mossad, authors MichaelBar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal take us behind the closed curtain with riveting, eye-opening, boots-on-the-ground accounts of the most dangerous, most crucial missions in the agency's 60-year history.

Dr. Elisha Waldman's years at Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Center were filled in equal measure with a deep sense of accomplishment, with frustration when regional politics sometimes got in the way of his patients' care, and with tension over the fine line he would have to walk when the religious traditions of some of his patients' families made it difficult for him to give these children the care he felt they deserved. Navigating the baffling Israeli bureaucracy, the ever-present threat of war, and cultural clashes, Waldman learned to be content with small victories.

The outspoken and radical Israeli historian Ilan Pappe examines the most contested ideas concerning the origins and identity of the contemporary state of Israel.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East Editor, has been covering the region since 1989 and is uniquely placed to explain its complex past and its troubled present. In this new book, in part based on his acclaimed podcast, Bowen takes us on a journey across the Middle East and through its history. He meets ordinary men and women on the front line, their leaders, whether brutal or benign, and he explores the power games that have so often wreaked devastation on civilian populations as those leaders, whatever their motives, jostle for political, religious and economic control.

A thrilling and revelatory narrative of one of the most epic and consequential periods in 20th century history - the Arab Revolt and the secret “great game” to control the Middle East. Lawrence in Arabia definitively overturns received wisdom on how the modern Middle East was formed. Sweeping in its action, keen in its portraiture, acid in its condemnation of the destruction wrought by European colonial plots, this is a book that brilliantly captures the way in which the folly of the past creates the anguish of the present.

Afghanistan, a landlocked country in Central Asia, has improbably been at the center of international geopolitics for four decades. After the Soviet Union invaded in 1980, Afghanistan descended into an unending conflict that featured at various points most of the world's major powers. In Afghanistan: What Everyone Needs to Know, leading scholar Barnett R. Rubin provides an overview of this complicated nation. After providing a concise history of Afghanistan, he explores the various peoples and cultures of the country and its relations with neighbors like Pakistan and Iran.

Christians have lived in Palestine since the earliest days of the Jesus movement. The Palestinian church predates Islam. Yet Palestinian Christians find themselves marginalized and ostracized. In the heated tensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the voices of Palestinian Christians are often unheard and ignored. This remarkable book provides an opportunity to hear the realities of life on the ground from a leading Palestinian pastor and theologian.

Iran and the United States have been at odds for forty years, locked in a cold war that has run the gamut. In Republics of Myth, Hussein Banai, Malcolm Byrne, and John Tirman argue that a major contributing factor to this tenacious enmity is how each nation views itself. Their often-deadly confrontation derives from the very different national narratives that shape their politics, actions, and vision of their own destiny in the world.

Passing from lip to ear, the philosophies of Hermes Trismegistus have been passed down through thousands of years. Listen as this tradition continues in this audio compilation of The Kybalion, Corpus Hermeticum, The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, and The Life and Teachings of Hermes Trismegistus. This unprecedented collection will provide the foundation of the Hermetic Philosophy.

From the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Lawrence in Arabia, a stunningly revelatory narrative history of one of the most momentous events in modern times, the jaw-dropping stupidity of the American government, and the dawn of the age of religious nationalism.

Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgement Day, and the battlefield of today's clash of civilizations. From King David to Barack Obama, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the epic history of 3,000 years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism, and coexistence. How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the 'centre of the world' and now the key to peace in the Middle East?

The explosive first-hand account of America's secret history in Afghanistan. With the publication of Ghost Wars, Steve Coll became not only a Pulitzer Prize winner, but also the expert on the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of Bin Laden, and the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill Bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998.

In 1948, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were forced out of their homes by the first Arab-Israeli War. More than seventy years later, most of their houses are long gone, but millions of their descendants are still registered as refugees, with many living in refugee camps. This group—unlike countless others that were displaced in the aftermath of World War II and other conflicts—has remained unsettled, demanding to settle in the state of Israel. Their belief in a "right of return" is one of the largest obstacles to successful diplomacy and lasting peace in the region.

The office of the bishop of Rome is one of the most powerful positions in the world. As an ancient institution stretching back for centuries, the papacy has a history that is marked by archaic and modern customs alike. The history of the men who have held this position is fraught with villainous and heroic actions that have left a profound impact on the development of civilization as we know it, both in the West and East.

In elegant and witty prose, André Aciman introduces us to the marvelous eccentrics who shaped his life—Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; Aunt Flora, the German refugee who warns that Jews lose everything "at least twice in their lives." And through it all, we come to know a boy who, even as he longs for a wider world, does not want to be led, forever, out of Egypt.

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.

"I first met al-Qaeda before there was an al-Qaeda, way back in the winter of 1984. It was an encounter that came within a split second of costing me my life." So begins Rob Schultheis's gripping account of his journey into the heart of one of the world's most dangerous places, on the trail of the world's most wanted man. A veteran war correspondent, Schultheis offers a first-hand look at how the seeds of al-Qaeda were planted by foreign jihadists in the 1980s, before most Americans knew what the word "jihad" meant.

In just over a hundred years - from the death of Muhammad in 632 to the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750 - the followers of the Prophet swept across the whole of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. Their armies threatened states as far flung as the Franks in Western Europe and the Tang Empire in China. The conquered territory was larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion, and it was claimed for the Arabs in roughly half the time.