Memoir Middle East

In the heart of the Ottoman Empire as World War I rages, Stepan Miskjian's world becomes undone. He is separated from his family as they are swept up in the government's mass deportation of Armenians into internment camps. Gradually realizing the unthinkable - that they are all being driven to their deaths - he fights, through starvation and thirst, not to lose hope.

This passionate autobiography—at once history lesson, prison memoir, metaphysical inquiry, love story, and cry for justice—provides insights into the Israeli occupation and the struggle of the Palestinian people.

Leila Slimani was in her native Morocco promoting her novel Adèle, about a woman addicted to sex, when she began meeting women who confided the dark secrets of their sexual lives. In Morocco, adultery, abortion, homosexuality, prostitution, and sex outside of marriage are all punishable by law, and women have only two choices: They can be wives or virgins. Sex and Lies combines vivid, often harrowing testimonies with Slimani's passionate and intelligent commentary to make a galvanizing case for a sexual revolution in the Arab world.

In 2012, American journalist Theo Padnos, fluent in Arabic, Russian, German, and French, traveled to a Turkish border town to write and report on the Syrian civil war. One afternoon in October, while walking through an olive grove, he met three young Syrians - who turned out to be al Qaeda operatives - and they captured him and kept him prisoner for nearly two years. On his first day, in the first of many prisons, Padnos was given a blindfold - a grime-stained scrap of fabric - that was his only possession throughout his horrific ordeal.

Laura Kasinof studied Arabic in college and moved to Yemen a few years later - after a friend at a late-night party in Washington, DC, recommended the country as a good place to work as a freelance journalist. When she first moved to Sanaa in 2009, she was the only American reporter based in the country. She quickly fell in love with Yemen’s people and culture, in addition to finding herself the star of a local TV soap opera.

Ten years after an attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, cries of "Benghazi!" still echo across America. But instead of a landmark event to be taken seriously, it has become a punchline, an empty word, or a code for controversy and political theatre. In this thrilling retelling, Ethan Chorin reveals Benghazi as a watershed moment in American history, one that helped create the world America lives in today: polarized, fearful, and dangerously unstable.

Filled with love for land, history, and people, it is more than anything else—a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling. How the son (one of six), born at the height of the displacements to a disabled father and illiterate mother, a believer in peaceful resistance, became a leading poet and writer in Palestine, before being forced, with his own young family in tow, to flee and start a new life in Australia.

MBS is the untold story of how one man fought his way to the summit of power in Saudi Arabia, the wealthiest country in the Middle East and a key ally of the United States. Even in his youth as an obscure prince among the vast Saudi royal family, Mohammed bin Salman nurtured sweeping ambitions to accumulate power and reshape his staunchly conservative kingdom and its interactions with the world.

At the Arab Spring's hopeful start, Alia Malek returned to Damascus to reclaim her grandmother's apartment, which had been lost to her family since Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970. Its loss was central to her parents' decision to make their lives in America. In chronicling the people who lived in the Tahaan building, past and present, Alia portrays the Syrians—the Muslims, Christians, Jews, Armenians, and Kurds—who worked, loved, and suffered in close quarters, mirroring the political shifts in their country

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.

The U.S. government spends enormous resources each year on the gathering and analysis of intelligence, yet the history of American foreign policy is littered with missteps and misunderstandings that have resulted from intelligence failures. In Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis examines the politics and psychology of two of the more spectacular intelligence failures in recent memory: the belief that the Shah in Iran was secure and stable in 1978, and the claim that Iraq had active WMD programs in 2002.

Osman I is one of history’s most important leaders; the founder of the Ottoman Empire, which conquered Asia Minor, most of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Balkans before reaching the very walls of Vienna. Even after its demise, the politics of the Balkan states are very much influenced by the Ottoman past, and Muslim populations remain in the European lands once occupied by the Ottomans. The Middle East’s politics and conflicts trace back to the dissolution of the empire, and in Turkey, the Ottoman legacy remains a topic of national debate.

This riveting memoir follows a Lebanese Muslim American and 30-year US Marine veteran who suffered a six-month ordeal at the hands of a brutal regime in Yemen - and remained loyal to his country through it all.

Ami Ayalon seeks input and perspective from Palestinians and Israelis whose experiences differ from his own. As head of the Shin Bet security agency, he gained empathy for "the enemy" and learned that when Israel carries out anti-terrorist operations in a political context of hopelessness, the Palestinian public will support violence, because they have nothing to lose. Researching and writing Friendly Fire, he came to understand that his patriotic life had blinded him to the self-defeating nature of policies that have undermined Israel's civil society.

The Gulf War of 1990-91 was probably the last major deployment of arms by the UK on such a scale and a larger gathering of armour than the Battle of Kursk in WW II. This is a personal account of the Gulf War 1990-91 and the liberation of Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm / Operation Granby by a Troop Leader in a front line tank squadron; B Squadron The 14/20th Kings Hussars, 4th Armoured Brigade, 1 British Division. Forward by General Sir Richard Shirreff. This is not a political or strategic study, but a look at the lives of the men who lived and fought on and from their tanks.

Thomas Edward Lawrence first set foot on the hot sands of Arabia in 1909. By 1918 there was a £20,000 price on his head. His journey to this point has long been legend. From his first postings as archaeologist, liaison and map officer, to fighting alongside guerrilla forces during the Arab Revolt, Lawrence gave over his life fully to this land and its people. A legend in his own lifetime, Lawrence's epic story has always been ripe for the retelling. In Lawrence of Arabia, Fiennes brings us at last to a true and full account of this mysterious adventurer who captivated the world.

Growing up in Tehran in the 1960s, Terence Ward and his brothers were watched over by Hassan, the family’s cook, housekeeper, and cultural guide. After an absence of 30 years and much turmoil in Iran, Ward embarks on a quixotic pilgrimage with his family in search of their lost friend. However, as they set out on this improbable quest with no address or phone number, their only hope lies in their mother’s small black and white photograph taken decades before.

Lawrence of Arabia is one of the most iconic figures of the First World War, seen by many as a heroic and romantic guerrilla leader in a period of savage and deeply impersonal industrial warfare. While Lawrence himself has been the subject of many biographies and an award-winning film, the context of his war in the desert, and his ideas on war itself, are less well-known. Lawrence of Arabia on War is a study of those ideas and of his campaign of irregular warfare which has informed tactical theory and decision-making down to the present day.

Ruth Elias, a Jewish woman who was taken to Auschwitz while several months pregnant, recounts her challenging and unthinkable story of confronting perhaps the most agonizing choice so that she and her newborn infant would not die. Taken for Nazi medical experimentation, she confronted the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele and saved the life of not only herself but her child as well.

Pamela Olson, a small town girl from eastern Oklahoma, had what she always wanted: a physics degree from Stanford University. But instead of feeling excited for what came next, she felt consumed by dread and confusion. This irresistible memoir chronicles her journey from aimless ex-bartender to Ramallah-based journalist and foreign press coordinator for a Palestinian presidential candidate.