Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Social & Behavioral Sciences — History, Geography & Area Studies — Middle East & North Africa

Fawaz (Tufts) eloquently writes of the human drama that transformed Greater Syria during WW I.  Beyond the useful summary of battles devastating the region, an otherwise simplistic story of victims and war criminals is complicated when the author combines soldiers testimonies (be they Indians, British, or Ottoman) with the bitter reflections of rebels later betrayed by Europeans.  Relying entirely on published works, the book's seven detailed chapters reflect on the human costs and thus add a much-needed empathy for those experiencing war.  By usefully juxtaposing the reflections of starving city-dwellers facing hyperinflation with testimonies of peasants confronting swarms of locusts devastating crops, the author complicates the story, which is as much a product of Allied strategies or local war profiteers greed as the results of a singularly evil Turk.  Additionally, Fawaz deepens the historic relevance of Armenians fleeing the horrors of Eastern Anatolia; not only are they victims of mass murder, they also fill a constructive place in postwar Syria.  As a historical accounting, this is the best book for teaching students about WW I in the Middle East.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries.

Superbly researched and meticulously written, this book is the result of extensive research on the history of the Palestine mandate from the Balfour Declaration (1917) to the establishment of the state of Israel (1948).  Cohen (Bar-Ilan Univ., Israel), a prominent historian of the Middle East, examines this complex history with an impressive command of archival sources.  In nearly 500 pages, he provides an extensive account about Britains changing policy in Palestine and how it contributed to the Arab-Zionist conflict.  Readers will find discussions on a wide range of subjects, such as Britains early commitment to Zionism, the Holocaust, and the establishment of the state of Israel; the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and his relations with the Nazis; the Arab rebellions; Benito Mussolinis policy in Palestine; and much more.  A must read for students and scholars of British imperialism in the Middle East between the two war worlds.Summing Up: Essential. Most levels/libraries.

In the ever-growing and highly saturated field of Arab-Israeli conflict studies, it is rare for a book to break new ground and challenge long-held and well-entrenched perceptions.  This is one of those rare exceptions.  Based on a wide array of archival documentation, contemporary intellectual journals, and secondary literature, Gribetz (Princeton) offers a compelling new reading of mutual perceptions of self and other between the main protagonists of that conflictJews and Arabs, Zionists and Palestiniansat the very historical moment it was about to erupt.  Moving back and forth between the writings of fin-de-siècle Arab intellectuals, such as Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidis unpublished manuscript as-Saynizm, and Jewish journalists such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the author convincingly demonstrates that at its base, the encounter between these two groups was not based solely or even primarily on converging nationalist sentiments.  Rather, the mostly indirect discourse often involved the language of race and religion, not necessarily always in an adversarial fashion.  For that important contribution, this book should be hailed as a significant addition to the scholarly literature about late Ottoman Palestine.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

In this thoroughly researched, comprehensive, and deftly written historical account of the Gaza Strip beginning with the Hyksos from 18th century BCE and extending to the present, Filiu (Sciences Po, Paris) has arguably written the best book on Gaza's history.  He shows the historical intricacies between political and military developments and how such processes have shaped the Arab-Israeli conflict.  In his most interesting discussion, Filiu provides a superb account of the complexity of Palestinian political revolts and the shaping of political authority in Gaza in the context of regional and global conflicts.  Gaza's chronological history ends with a discussion on the ongoing rivalry between Islamists and secular nationalists, which has become increasingly contentious in response to the ongoing stalemate in the peace process with Israel, and the international community's failure to successfully interfere in order to resolve the conflict.  While the chronological account leaves out some significant discussions, such as everyday politics in Gaza, as in Asef Bayat'sLife as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (CH, Aug'10, 47-7167), Filiu is at his best when he engages with various sources in uncovering histories mostly ignored or even unknown to many.  A must read for students and scholars of the modern Middle East, and anyone who wants to understand Palestinian history.Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic libraries.

This is an excellent book.  Murray (US Marine Corps Univ.) and Woods (Institute for Defense Analyses) do not drown readers in the jargon of the subject, and they meticulously explain everything in their well-researched and enormously interesting work.  They develop their themes rapidly and cleanly.  Fully explained are the incompetence, factors of fear and coercion, useless battles, countless dead, and wholesale destruction, all driven by the leaders' egos on both sides and regardless of the treasures destroyed.  The combatants won little and learned less.  There are, however, a few negatives.  First, the maps are not good.  Second, the authors should have been more assertive about what both sides wanted and discussed whether the great powers in the West wanted the war to go on to weaken both sides in the region's great power vacuum of the 1980s.  Nevertheless, this is a superb book, well written without biases and a breath of fresh air on a difficult subject, without the mist, fog, and haze that usually come with the literature in this field.  Mandatory for graduate students.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

The Abisaabs (both, McGill Univ., Canada) have written an excellent political history of a population of growing contemporary importance.  Focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries, the authors reveal how a small rural population located mostly in southern Lebanon gradually achieved influence and power and underwent urbanization.  After a significant split, one group, calling itself Hezbollah, became a dominating political and military force.  The authors beautifully explore the subtleties of religious and political doctrine and their adoption by sometimes-charismatic leadership.  One bothersome flaw: citations peppering this study are rarely critically evaluated, so occasional nonsensical statements appear: e.g., in the 2006 fighting with Israel, Israel dropped more than a million cluster bombs in the last days leading to the cease fire.  (p. 142)  That criticism aside, this study is well researched and eminently readable.  It is must reading for understanding contemporary affairs in todays Levant.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.