Rick Bragg

Jessica Lynch

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

California

The Jessica Lynch Story

I Am a Soldier, Too

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Bernard Lewis

Published 2001, ex-library copy 1st Edition/4th Printing/Dust Jacket

New Jersey

Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response

For many centuries, the world of Islam was in the forefront of human achievement--the foremost military and economic power in the world, the leader in the arts and sciences of civilization. Christian Europe, a remote land beyond its northwestern frontier, was seen as an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief from which there was nothing to learn or to fear. And then everything changed, as the previously despised West won victory after victory, first in the battlefield and the marketplace, then in almost every aspect of public and even private life.

In this intriguing volume, Bernard Lewis examines the anguished reaction of the Islamic world as it tried to understand why things had changed--how they had been overtaken, overshadowed, and to an increasing extent dominated by the West. Lewis provides a fascinating portrait of a culture in turmoil. He shows how the Middle East turned its attention to understanding European weaponry and military tactics, commerce and industry, government and diplomacy, education and culture. Lewis highlights the striking differences between the Western and Middle Eastern cultures from the 18th to the 20th centuries through thought-provoking comparisons of such things as Christianity and Islam, music and the arts, the position of women, secularism and the civil society, the clock and the calendar.

Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies," Bernard Lewis is one of the West's foremost authorities on Islamic history and culture. In this striking volume, he offers an incisive look at the historical relationship between the Middle East and Europe.


What Went Wrong?

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Ex-library copy. Front matter torn out, has other library markings.

Voices of Refusal and Dissent

These essays are an urgent and passionate intervention by Israeli citizens challenging the continued occupation of Palestinian territory and the failed policies of Ariel Sharon's government. Against a backdrop of increasing violence on both sides, the book presents a broad range of dissenting voices that articulate practical, legal and moral objections to the occupation.

The Other Israel

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Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East

Less than twenty-four months after the hope-filled Arab uprising, the popular movement had morphed into a dystopia of resurgent dictators, failed states, and civil wars. Egypt's epochal transition to democracy ended in a violent military coup. Yemen and Libya collapsed into civil war, while Bahrain erupted in smothering sectarian repression. Syria proved the greatest victim of all, ripped apart by internationally fueled insurgencies and an externally supported, bloody-minded regime. Amidst the chaos, a virulently militant group declared an Islamic State, seizing vast territories and inspiring terrorism across the globe. What happened?

The New Arab Wars is a profound illumination of the causes of this nightmare. It details the costs of the poor choices made by regional actors, delivers a scathing analysis of Western misreadings of the conflict, and condemns international interference that has stoked the violence. Informed by commentators and analysts from the Arab world, Marc Lynch's narrative of a vital region's collapse is both wildly dramatic and likely to prove definitive. Most important, he shows that the region's upheavals have only just begun -- and that the hopes of Arab regimes and Western policy makers to retreat to old habits of authoritarian stability are doomed to fail.

The New Arab Wars

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Ex-library copy. Title page and other front matter torn out; has other library markings.

Israel Ten Years after Oslo

What went wrong after Oslo? How can Israelis and Palestinians make peace? How has the violence changed their lives and their souls? For the last ten years, David Grossman, one of Israel's great fiction writers, has addressed these questions in a series of passionate essays and articles, writing not only as one of his country's most repsected novelists and reporters, but as a husband and father and peace activist bitterly disappointed in the leaders of both sides. Appearing for the first time in America, these pieces show us the Israeli-Palestinian conflixt from the inside and the moment. They are indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand the roots and the results of the fighting today.

Death As a Way of Life

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Ex-library copy, torn from page and other ex-libris markings 

Blossoms on the Olive Tree is an American woman's account of work that Israeli and Palestinian women are doing to educate themselves and their societies about militarization, human rights, women's rights, and the democratic process. The book highlights women on both sides of the political divide who reach out to each other, engage in bi-national dialogue, and challenge ongoing violence.

Blossoms on the Olive Tree is an American woman's account of work that Israeli and Palestinian women are doing to educate themselves and their societies about militarization, human rights, women's rights, and the democratic process. The book highlights women on both sides of the political divide who reach out to each other, engage in bi-national dialogue, and challenge ongoing violence. Despite severe societal restraints in carving out political space for themselves, women in both societies have devised creative opportunities. Powers documents the women's working committees attached to Palestinian political parties and the creativity of Israeli women striving to civil-ize their society. Ironically, it is their marginalization that offers women space to engage in their peace-building efforts. The book ends with a clarion call for the implementation of UN Resolution 1325, which requires the presences of women at the highest levels of peace negotiations. Women, with their commitment to reconciliation and healing, bring a significant vision to the enterprise of peace-building, and Powers suggests that it's high time they be taken seriously.

In the course of researching this book, Powers stayed in Jewish homes, Muslim homes, and Christian homes, observing women going about their daily tasks. She shared Shabbat dinners and Christmas dinners, Muslim family celebrations, herbal tea and Arab coffee, benefiting from extraordinary hospitality, and learning that Israeli and Palestinian are more alike than they are different. Like women everywhere, Jewish and Arab women care deeply for their children, put up with anger and abuse from their husbands, and try to negotiate a path between societal expectations and personal convictions. Virtually all of them yearn to live in peace, to raise their families without fear, and to enjoy the small pleasures of life without anxiety for the future. These are their stories, and they impart a measure of humanity to the occupation, the Separation Wall, and living with the fear of suicide bombings that is difficult to glean from nightly news reports. Most important, these remarkable women are succeeding in changing from within the way in which their own societies think about themselves.

Blossoms on the Olive Tree: Israeli and Palestinian Women Working for Peace

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Sari Nusseibeh

Anthony David

Arizona

A Palestinian Life

ANew York Times Book ReviewEditors' Choice

A teacher, a scholar, a philosopher, and an eyewitness to history, Sari Nusseibeh is one of our most urgent and articulate authorities on the conflict in the Middle East. From his time teaching side by side with Israelis at the Hebrew University through his appointment by Yasir Arafat to administer the Arab Jerusalem, he has held fast to the principles of freedom and equality for all, and his story dramatizes the consequences of war, partition, and terrorism as few other books have done.Once Upon a Country brings rare depth and compassion to the story of his country.

Once upon a Country

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William G. Dever

This book addresses one of the most timely and urgent topics in archaeology and biblical studies -- the origins of early Israel. For centuries the Western tradition has traced its beginnings back to ancient Israel, but recently some historians and archaeologists have questioned the reality of Israel as it is described in biblical literature. In "Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?" William Dever explores the continuing controversies regarding the true nature of ancient Israel and presents the archaeological evidence for assessing the accuracy of the well-known Bible stories. Confronting the range of current scholarly interpretations seriously and dispassionately, Dever rejects both the revisionists who characterize biblical literature as pious propaganda and the conservatives who are afraid to even question its factuality. Attempting to break through this impasse, Dever draws on thirty years of archaeological fieldwork in the Near East, amassing a wide range of hard evidence for his own compelling view of the development of Israelite history. In his search for the actual circumstances of Israel's emergence in Canaan, Dever reevaluates the Exodus-Conquest traditions in the books of Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, and 1 & 2 Samuel in the light of well-documented archaeological evidence from the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age. Among this important evidence are some 300 small agricultural villages recently discovered in the heartland of what would later become the biblical nation of Israel. According to Dever, the authentic ancestors of the Israelite peoples were most likely Canaanites -- together with some pastoral nomads and small groups of Semiticslaves escaping from Egypt -- who, through the long cultural and socioeconomic struggles recounted in the book of Judges, managed to forge a new agrarian, communitarian, and monotheistic society. Written in an engaging, accessible style and featuring fifty photographs that help bring the archaeological record to life, this book provides an authoritative statement on the origins of ancient Israel and promises to reinvigorate discussion about the historicity of the biblical tradition.

Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?

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Queen Noor

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Memoirs of an Unexpected Life

Born in 1951 to a distinguished Arab-American family, Lisa Najeeb Halaby became the fourth wife of King Hussein at age 27. With her husband being not only Jordan's monarch but the spiritual leader of all Muslims, Lisa was unsure what her role would be. This moving memoir provides a timely look at one woman's story against a backdrop of 30 turbulent years: the displacement of over 1 million Palestinians by the creation of Israel, King Hussein's frustrated efforts for peace, and the effect of Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War on Jordan and the royal family. Queen Noor offers intimate new glimpses of King Hussein, Saddam Hussein, Queen Elizabeth, Arafat, and many other world leaders.

Leap of Faith

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Sayed Kashua

Miriam Shlesinger

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

"In his new novel, the young Arab-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua introduces a disillusioned journalist who returns to his hometown, an Arab village within Israel, hoping to reclaim the simplicity of life among kin. But the prodigal son returns to a place where the people are petty and provincial and everything is smaller than he remembers. When Israeli tanks surround the village without explanation, the community devolves into a Darwinian jungle, and the journalist and his family must negotiate the fault lines of a world on the brink of implosion."--BOOK JACKET.

Let It Be Morning

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New York

Hailed as "an unusually gifted storyteller with exceptional insight" (Jewish Tribune), Bernstein award-winning writer Sayed Kashua presents his masterful fourth novel Track Changes which follows an Arab-Israeli man as he reckons with the weight of his past, his memories, and his cultural identity. Having emigrated to America years before, a nameless memoirist now residing in Illinois receives word that his estranged father, whom he has not spoken to in fourteen years, is dying. Leaving his wife and their three children, he returns to Jerusalem and to his hometown of Tira in Palestine to be by his family's side. But few are happy to see him back and, geographically and emotionally displaced, he feels more alienated from his life than ever. Sitting by his father's hospital bed, the memoirist begins to remember long-buried traumas, the root causes of his fallout with his family, the catalyst for his marriage and its recent dissolution, and his strained relationships with his children--all of which is strangely linked to a short story he published years ago about a young girl named Palestine. As he plunges deeper into his memory and recounts the history of his land and his love, the lines between truth and lies, fact and fiction become increasingly blurred. Track Changes is a stunningly original, poignant, and captivating exploration of alienation, love, country, and memory by one of the most important writers at work today.

Track Changes

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Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Michigan

A masterful debut novel by Plimpton Prize winner Isabella Hammad, The Parisian illuminates a pivotal period of Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return to Palestine at the dawn of its battle for independence.

Midhat Kamal is the son of a wealthy textile merchant from Nablus, a town in Ottoman Palestine. A dreamer, a romantic, an aesthete, in 1914 he leaves to study medicine in France, and falls in love. When Midhat returns to Nablus to find it under British rule, and the entire region erupting with nationalist fervor, he must find a way to cope with his conflicting loyalties and the expectations of his community. The story of Midhat's life develops alongside the idea of a nation, as he and those close to him confront what it means to strive for independence in a world that seems on the verge of falling apart.

Against a landscape of political change that continues to define the Middle East, The Parisian explores questions of power and identity, enduring love, and the uncanny ability of the past to disrupt the present. Lush and immersive, and devastating in its power, The Parisian is an elegant, richly-imagined debut from a dazzling new voice in fiction.

The Parisian

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#hardcover #palestine #israel #middleeast p19jnvdd 

Massachusetts

A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine


"[Shehadeh's] books are maps, painstakingly pieced together, of regions lost to senseless division, to bad choices, and to lies."
--The Nation

"Remarkable and hopeful . . . a deeply honest and intense memoir."
--Gal Beckerman, The New York Times Book Review

A moving account of one man's border crossings--both literal and figurative--by the award-winning author of Palestinian Walks, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Six Day War

In what has become a classic of Middle Eastern literature, Raja Shehadeh, in Palestinian Walks, wrote of his treks through the hills surrounding Ramallah over a period of three decades under Israel's occupation.

In Where the Line Is Drawn, Shehadeh explores how occupation has affected him personally, chronicling the various crossings that he undertook into Israel over a period of forty years to visit friends and family, to enjoy the sea, to argue before the Israeli courts, and to negotiate failed peace agreements.

Those forty years also saw him develop a close friendship with Henry, a Canadian Jew who immigrated to Israel at around the same time Shehadeh returned to Palestine from studying in London. While offering an unforgettably poignant exploration of Palestinian-Israeli relationships, Where the Line Is Drawn also provides an anatomy of friendship and an exploration of whether, in the bleakest of circumstances, it is possible for bonds to transcend political divisions.


Where the Line Is Drawn

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Ohio

Israelis, Palestinians, and the Struggle for A Promised Land

The struggles of the Israelis and Palestinians - with their terrible histories of disaster and redemption - command the obsessive attention of the world. Statesmen tinker with peace plans for the Middle East and generals worry about future wars there. Religious leaders stoke the violent passions of the devout while pilgrims flock to find God and archaeologists dig to find the origins of His revelations. All this goes on under the watchful eye of an army of reporters, observers, diplomatic envoys, and aid workers.

Between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, dreams and ideals collide with the reality of violent nationalist struggle, and God's name is invoked in defense of the jealousies of men. With the experienced journalist's eye for irony, anecdote, and telling detail, Anton La Guardia offers an intimate look into the Israelis as they come to terms with the "post-Zionist" demolition of national myths, and the Palestinians as they try to build their own state. A classic in the making,War Without Endis the definitive book on Israel and her people.


War Without End

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Few terrorists have been as internationally notorious - or as deadly as "The Red Prince." That was the nickname of Ali Hassan Salameh, a Palestinian who oversaw the Black September Organization from 1970 until his murder by car bomb in 1979. Salameh masterminded the 1972 hijacking of Sabena flight 572 to Tel Aviv, killing 27 tourists at Israel's Lod airport, and the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich. In 1973, he organized the murder of the American and Saudi ambassadors in Sudan. The Red Prince's story is also that of General Aharon "Arale" Yariv, Golda Meir's choice to run Israel's counterterrorism response, and of Zvi Zamir, the head of the Mossad, Israel's intelligence unit. As this fascinating true cat-and-mouse story evolves, Zamir and Yariv orchestrate a series of daring cross-border assassinations, picking off Black September members one by one, chasing down Salameh until a final reckoning in Beirut. MUNICH does more than catalog the awful crimes of a terrorist, and Israel's search for a way to end his bloody reign: it authoritatively recounts the history of one of the central conflicts of our time - the Palestinian-Israeli struggle.

Massacre in Munich 

Ghada Karmi

A little bit of highlighting spread throughout the book. No annotations or dog ears. Dust jacket in excellent shape. 

Illinois

A Palestinian Memoir

An extraordinary memoir of exile and the impossibility of finding home, from the author of In Search of Fatima “The journey filled me with bitterness and grief. I remember looking down on a nighttime Tel Aviv from the windows of a place taking me back to London and thinking hopelessly, ‘flotsam and jetsam, that’s what we’ve become, scattered and divided. There’s no room for us or our memories here. And it won’t be reversed.’” Having grown up in Britain following her family’s exile from Palestine, doctor, author and academic Ghada Karmi leaves her adoptive home in a quest to return to her homeland. She starts work with the Palestinian Authority and gets a firsthand understanding of its bizarre bureaucracy under Israel’s occupation. In her quest, she takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the heart of one of the world’s most intractable conflict zones and one of the major issues of our time. Visiting places she has not seen since childhood, her unique insights reveal a militarised and barely recognisable homeland, and her home in Jerusalem, like much of the West Bank, occupied by strangers. Her encounters with politicians, fellow Palestinians, and Israeli soldiers cause her to question what role exiles like her have in the future of their country and whether return is truly possible.

Return

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A Little Piece Of Ground will help young readers understand more about one of the worst conflicts afflicting our world today.


Written by Elizabeth Laird, one of Great Britain's best-known young adult authors, A Little Piece Of Ground explores the human cost of the occupation of Palestinian lands through the eyes of a young boy.

Twelve-year-old Karim Aboudi and his family are trapped in their Ramallah home by a strict curfew. In response to a Palestinian suicide bombing, the Israeli military subjects the West Bank town to a virtual siege. Meanwhile, Karim, trapped at home with his teenage brother and fearful parents, longs to play football with his friends. When the curfew ends, he and his friend discover an unused patch of ground that's the perfect site for a football pitch. Nearby, an old car hidden intact under bulldozed building makes a brilliant den. But in this city there's constant danger, even for schoolboys. And when Israeli soldiers find Karim outside during the next curfew, it seems impossible that he will survive.


This powerful book fills a substantial gap in existing young adult literature on the Middle East. With 23,000 copies already sold in the United Kingdom and Canada, this book is sure to find a wide audience among young adult readers in the United States.

A Little Piece of Ground

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Suzanne Joinson

In 1920s Jerusalem, eleven-year-old Prudence watches her architect father launch an ambitious (and crazy) plan to redesign the Holy City by importing English parks to the desert. He employs a British pilot, William Harrington, to take aerial photographs of the city, and soon Prue becomes uncomfortably aware of the attraction flaring between Harrington and Eleanora, the young English wife of a famous Jerusalem photographer. Palestine has been a surprisingly harmonious mix of British colonials, exiled Armenians, and Greek, Arab, and Jewish officials rubbing elbows, but there are simmers of trouble ahead. When Harrington learns that Eleanora's husband is part of an underground group intent on removing the British, a dangerous game begins.

Years later, in 1937, Prue is an artist living a reclusive life by the sea when Harrington pays her a surprise visit. What he reveals unravels her world, and she must follow the threads that lead her back to secrets long-ago buried in Jerusalem.

The Photographer's Wife is a powerful story of betrayal: between father and daughter, between husband and wife, and between nations and people, set in the complex period between the two world wars.

The Photographer's Wife

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Naomi Shihab Nye

I have other books by this author on my shelf!

Poems from the Middle East

In this stirring anthology of sixty poems from the Middle East, honored anthologist Naomi Shihab Nye welcomes us to this lush, vivid world and beckons us to explore. Eloquent pieces from Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, and elsewhere open windows into the hearts and souls of people we usually meet only on the nightly news. What we see when we look through these windows is the love of family, friends, and for the Earth, the daily occurrences of life that touch us forever, the longing for a sense of place. What we learn is that beneath the veil of stereotypes, our human connections are stronger than our cultural differences.

The Flag of Childhood

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#hardcover #historical #mystery #peters #NYTbestseller #Palestine #archeology #deckleedge

Minnesota

A Novel

"Between Amelia Peabody and Indiana Jones, it's Amelia--in wit and daring--by a landslide."

--New York Times Book Review

Intrepid archaeologist and superior sleuth Amelia Peabody returns in A River in the Sky. In this breathtaking new adventure, New York Times bestselling Grand Master Elizabeth Peters transports the indomitable Amelia and her family, the Emersons, from their usual milieu, early twentieth-century Egypt, to an exciting--and dangerous--new locale: Palestine! A tale full of atmosphere, intrigue, and thrills, A River in the Sky is further proof that "Peters has few rivals" (Houston Chronicle).



A River in the Sky

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Indiana

"The novel showcases the humanity, tragedy, and complexity of life in the West Bank... The characters' interwoven lives will stay with you long after the book's denouement." --Entertainment Weekly "Sacks is an extraordinarily gifted writer whose intelligence, compassion and skill on both the sentence and tension level rise to meet her ambition. She keeps us constantly on edge...City of a Thousand Gates makes a convincing case for a literature of multiplicity, polyphonic and clamorous, abuzz with challenges and contradictions, with no clear answers but a promise to stay alert to the world, in all its peril and vitality." --Washington Post Brave and bold, this gorgeously written novel introduces a large cast of characters from various backgrounds in a setting where violence is routine and where survival is defined by boundaries, walls, and checkpoints that force people to live and love within and across them. Hamid, a college student, has entered Israeli territory illegally for work. Rushing past soldiers, he bumps into Vera, a German journalist headed to Jerusalem to cover the story of Salem, a Palestinian boy beaten into a coma by a group of revenge-seeking Israeli teenagers. On her way to the hospital, Vera runs in front of a car that barely avoids hitting her. The driver is Ido, a new father traveling with his American wife and their baby. Ido is distracted by thoughts of a young Jewish girl murdered by a terrorist who infiltrated her settlement. Ori, a nineteen-year-old soldier from a nearby settlement, is guarding the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem through which Samar--Hamid's professor--must pass. These multiple strands open this magnificent and haunting novel of present-day Israel and Palestine, following each of these diverse characters as they try to protect what they love. Their interwoven stories reveal complicated, painful truths about life in this conflicted land steeped in hope, love, hatred, terror, and blood on both sides. City of a Thousand Gates brilliantly evokes the universal drives that motivate these individuals to think and act as they do--desires for security, for freedom, for dignity, for the future of one's children, for land that each of us, no matter who or where we are, recognize and share.

City of a Thousand Gates

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Randa Abdel-Fattah

Year eleven at an exclusive prep school in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, would be tough enough, but it is further complicated for Amal when she decides to wear the hijab, the Muslim head scarf, full-time as a badge of her faith--without losing her identity or sense of style. Reprint.

Does My Head Look Big in This?

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Signed by author. #nonfiction #paperback #palestine #israel #arabs #jews #politics #conflict #signed #autographed

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Kansas

The Story of a Palestinian Mother and Her People

Palestinian Memories

Joost R. Hiltermann

#hardcover #behindtheintifada #nonfiction #hiltermann #middleeast #internationalpolitics #palestine

Maryland

Labor and Women's Movements in the Occupied Territories

Before the intifada began, Joost Hiltermann had already looked at local organizations in the Israeli- occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and seen there the main elements that would eventually be used to mobilize the Palestinian masses. In the first comprehensive study of these organizations, Hiltermann shows how local organizers provided basic services unavailable under military rule, while recruiting for the cause of Palestinian nationalism.Before the intifada began, Joost Hiltermann had already looked at local organizations in the Israeli- occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and seen there the main elements that would eventually be used to mobilize the Palestinian masses. In the first comprehensive study of these organizations, Hiltermann shows how local organizers provided basic services unavailable under military rule, while recruiting for the cause of Palestinian nationalism.

Save this search

Rick Bragg; Jessica Lynch

I Am a Soldier, Too

Bernard Lewis

What Went Wrong?

Roane Carey (Editor); Jonathan Shainin (Editor)

The Other Israel

Marc Lynch

The New Arab Wars

David Grossman; Haim Watzman (Translator)

Death As a Way of Life

Janet M. Powers; Betty A. Reardon (Foreword by); Elise Boulding (Introduction by)