Hoping to get out of Russia and return to his adopted home in the U.S., Misha Vainberg, the obese son of a wealthy Russian, makes his way to Absurdsvani?, a small unstable country on the brink of civil war.

"A book like a pocket lamp that contests darkness: the darkness fabricated by those who have promoted a global blindness concerning what has happened in Palestine and Israel during the last sixty years. The battery of this remarkable lamp is true observation, and with it you discover exemplary courage in the most unexpected places. Pocket it! --John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and About Looking "Riordon's portraits reveal what it means to be...

Recollections of Jerusalem vividly opens up to us a world very different from our own. It affords the rare opportunity to see major world events through the eyes of one shaped by them, but unable to influence them. At the outset of World War II, the author, still a young child, travelled to Jerusalem with her mother on pilgrimage. Prevented by the conflict from returning to their home in Yugoslavia, they began a new life, intimately entwined with...

"In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. The city is a shell of the Beirut Osama remembers, but he and his friends and family take solace in the things that have always sustained them: gossip, laughter, and, above all, stories. Osama's grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching stories--of his arrival in Lebanon, an orphan of the Turkish wars, and of how he...

"A key player and an unrelenting obstacle in the Middle East peace process, Syria has long been a thorn in Washington's side when it comes to forging strategic alliances with powers in the region. But only after the events of 9/11 and Damascus's staunch opposition to the War in Iraq did the U.S. government begin a secret campaign to topple President Bashar al-Assad's regime and bring Syria into the Western political orbit. Author Andrew Tabler was...

A gripping story of one child's experience of the civil war in SyriaZafir has a comfortable life in Homs, Syria, until his father, a doctor, is arrested for helping a protester who was campaigning for revolution. While his mother heads to Damascus to try to find out where his father is being held, Zafir stays with his grandmother-until her house is bombed. With his father in prison, his mother absent, his grandmother ill and not a friend left in the...

"Drawing on a rich trove of documents, including correspondence not seen for 300 years, this study explores the emergence and growth of a remarkable global trade network operated by Armenian silk merchants from a small outpost in the Persian Empire. Based in New Julfa, Isfahan, in what is now Iran, these merchants operated a network of commercial settlements that stretched from London and Amsterdam to Manila and Acapulco. The New Julfan Armenians...

"A collection of 35 documents concerning the 100-year-old conflict over Palestine. The Balfour Declaration, the Sykes-Picot treaty, the League of Nations Mandate, the British White Papers, the report of the UN Special Committee on Palestine, the Palestine National Charter, the Camp David Accords, the Olso and Oslo II Accords. Preface gives historical introduction."--

"The people want . . .": This first half of slogans chanted by millions of Arab protesters since 2011 revealed a long-repressed craving for democracy. But huge social and economic problems were also laid bare by the protestors' demands. Simplistic interpretations of the uprising that has been shaking the Arab world since a young street vendor set himself on fire in Central Tunisia, on 17 December 2010, seek to portray it as purely political, or explain...

"Through a microhistory of a small province in Upper Egypt, this book investigates the history of five world empires that assumed hegemony in Qina province over the last five centuries. Imagined Empires charts modes of subaltern rebellion against the destructive policies of colonial intruders and collaborating local elites in the south of Egypt. Abul-Magd vividly narrates stories of sabotage, banditry, flight, and massive uprisings of peasants and...