The seeds of conflict throughout the Middle East were sown in the first 60 years of the 20th century. It was then that the Western powers - Britain, France and the USA - discovered the imperatives for intervention that have plunged the region into crisis ever since. It was then, too, that most of the region's modern-day states were created and their regimes forged; and then that their management by the West earned abiding resentment. "Sowing the Wind" tells of how and why this happened. The subject is painful and ...
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The seeds of conflict throughout the Middle East were sown in the first 60 years of the 20th century. It was then that the Western powers - Britain, France and the USA - discovered the imperatives for intervention that have plunged the region into crisis ever since. It was then, too, that most of the region's modern-day states were created and their regimes forged; and then that their management by the West earned abiding resentment. "Sowing the Wind" tells of how and why this happened. The subject is painful and essentially sombre, but John Keay illuminates it with lucid analysis and anecdotes. This is that rarest of works, a history with humour, an epic with attitude, a dirge that delights. Here are unearthed a host of unregarded precedents, from the Gulf's first "gusher" to the first aerial assault on Baghdad, the first of Syria's innumerable coups, and the first terrorist outrages and suicide bombers. Pre-Balfour to post-Suez, the familiar landmarks loom afresh from the obscure antics of lobbyists and the agonizings of administrations. Little known figures - junior officers, contractors, explorers, spies - contest the orthodoxies of Arabist giants like T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Glubb Pasha and Loy Henderson. The generals - Townshend and Allenby, Gouraud and Catroux, Wavell and Spears, Eisenhower and Patten - mingle memorably with maverick travellers and femmes both "fatales" and "formidables". Four Roosevelts juggle with the fate of nations. Authors as alien as E.M. Forster and Arthur Koestler add their testimony. And in Antonius and Weizmann, the Mufti and Begin, Arab is inexorably juxtaposed with Jew. Pertinent, scholarly and irreverent, "Sowing the Wind" provides an ambitious insight into the making of the world's most fraught arena.
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Add this copy of Sowing the Wind: the Seeds of Conflict in the Middle to cart. $3.75, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2003 by W. W. Norton & Company.
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Seller's Description:
Fair. 2003 first American edition, Little wear and scuff marks to jacket, dent to corners of boards. pages in nice condition, shipped from the UK. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 506 p. Contains: Illustrations.
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Add this copy of Sowing the Wind: the Seeds of Conflict in the Middle to cart. $24.00, new condition, Sold by Rose's Books rated 1.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Harwich Port, MA, UNITED STATES, published 2003 by W W Norton & Co Inc.
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Seller's Description:
New in New jacket. Book. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. First American Edition, stated. Hard cover binding, 506 pp. "In Sowing the Wind: The Seeds of Conflict in the Middle East, John Keay, as his subtitle promises, wants to answer the big question, about why the Middle East has produced so much conflict-and been at the receiving end of so much. His scope is impressive: he ranges from the dying Ottoman Empire before the First World War to the emergence of a new Egypt under Gamel Abdel Nasser after the Second. And he brings in wonderful characters-Lawrence of Arabia, of course, but also figures like the civil engineer who became the biggest contractor in Iraq and married one of two identical twin sisters, though no one ever knew which. Keay, the author of several books on the British Empire, tells a good story."(NYTimes). New in dustjacket.
