The Making of the Modern Middle East
Jeremy Bowen
Synopsis
A Sunday Times Paperback of the Year
A Spectator and New Statesman Book of the Year
‘An illuminating and riveting read.’ - Jonathan Dimbleby
Jeremy Bowen, the International Editor of the BBC, has been covering the Middle East since 1989 and is uniquely placed to explain its complex past and its troubled present. Here, Bowen offers readers a gripping and invaluable guide to the modern Middle East, how it came to be and what its future might hold.
In The Making of the Modern Middle East – in part based on his acclaimed podcast, ‘Our Man in the Middle East’ – Bowen takes us on a journey across the Middle East and through its history. He meets ordinary men and women on the front line, their leaders, whether brutal or benign, and he explores the power games that have so often wreaked devastation on civilian populations as those leaders, whatever their motives, jostle for political, religious and economic control.
Clear throughout is Bowen's deep understanding of the political, cultural and religious differences between countries as diverse as Erdogan’s Turkey, Assad’s Syria, Netanyahu’s Israel, and Palestine, whether Hamas-controlled Gaza or the West Bank, and his long experience of covering events in the region.
Written with modesty, grace and compassion, his account of 30 years working in the Middle East for the BBC combines his own personal experience with and a rare understanding of what makes this tortured region so dangerously combustible . . . The result is an illuminating and riveting read.Jonathan Dimbleby, broadcaster, author and historian
Arresting . . . excellent, doom-freightedJustin Marozzi, The Times
Bears witness to how lofty dreams of the post-Cold War period crashed and burned ... with deep empathy and understanding of the roots of the conflict.Emma Sky, The New Statesman