Memoir Middle East

Mokhtar Alkhanshali grew up in San Francisco, one of seven siblings raised by Yemeni immigrants in a tiny apartment. At age 24, unable to pay for college, he works as a doorman. Until: a statue of an Arab raising a cup of coffee awakens something in him. He sets out to learn the rich history of coffee in Yemen and the complex art of tasting and identifying varietals. He travels to Yemen, collects samples of beans, eager to bring improved cultivation methods to the farmers. And he is on the verge of success when civil war engulfs Yemen in 2015 and he is trapped in Sana'a.

Attempting to break the agonizing impasse between Israelis and Palestinians, the Israeli commentator and award-winning author of Like Dreamers directly addresses his Palestinian neighbors in this taut and provocative book, empathizing with Palestinian suffering and longing for reconciliation as he explores how the conflict looks through Israeli eyes.

It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.

When she was 7, Rayya Elias and her family fled the political conflict in their native Syria, settling in Detroit. Bullied in school and caught between the world of her traditional family and her tough American classmates, she rebelled early. Elias moved to New York City to become a musician and kept herself afloat with an uncommon talent for cutting hair. At the height of the punk movement, life on the Lower East Side was full of adventure, creative inspiration, and temptation.

Henry Kissinger is among the most controversial figures in American life. He has been lauded as a diplomatic Superman and cursed as a war criminal, credited with turning the tide of the Cold War and accused of causing genocide. At various times, he has inspired both admiration and deep suspicion among the American public.

The four spies at the center of this story were part of a ragtag unit known as the Arab Section, conceived during World War II by British spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage and assassinations, the unit consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel's existence in the balance during the War of Independence, our spies went undercover in Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a kiosk....

Thomas Edward Lawrence first set foot on the hot sands of Arabia in 1909. By 1918 there was a £20,000 price on his head. His journey to this point has long been legend. From his first postings as archaeologist, liaison and map officer, to fighting alongside guerrilla forces during the Arab Revolt, Lawrence gave over his life fully to this land and its people. A legend in his own lifetime, Lawrence's epic story has always been ripe for the retelling. In Lawrence of Arabia, Fiennes brings us at last to a true and full account of this mysterious adventurer who captivated the world.

Declan Walsh is one of the New York Times's most distinguished international correspondents. His electrifying portrait of Pakistan over a tumultuous decade captures the sweep of this strange, wondrous, and benighted country through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals. On assignment as the country careened between crises, Walsh traveled from the raucous port of Karachi to the salons of Lahore, and from Baluchistan to the mountains of Waziristan. He met a diverse cast of extraordinary Pakistanis....

A riveting memoir of the first Israeli-born Jewish American to be sent as a Peace Corps volunteer to a closed Arab society. A good memoir is a survivor's tale - the story of a person who has faced obstacles and made it through well enough to tell it. Dalya Cohen-Mor, a Sabra-born American woman, volunteered to serve in the Peace Corps, went through a lengthy and highly competitive application process, was accepted, and was sent to serve in the predominantly Palestinian country of Jordan.

As one of al-Qaeda's most respected bomb-makers, Aimen Dean rubbed shoulders with the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden himself. As a double agent at the heart of al-Qaeda's chemical weapons program, he foiled attacks on civilians and saved countless lives, brushing with death so often that his handlers began to call him their spy with nine lives. This is the story of how a young Muslim, determined to defend his faith, found himself fighting on the wrong side - and his fateful decision to work undercover for his sworn enemy.

In The Crash of Flight 3804, Investigative Journalist Charlotte Dennett digs into her father’s counterintelligence work, which pitted him against America’s wartime allies - the British, the French, and the Russians - in a covert battle for geopolitical and economic influence in the Middle East. Through vivid storytelling, extensive research, and deep analysis of region-defining maps, she reveals how feverish competition among intelligence networks, military, and Big Oil interests have fueled indiscriminate attacks and targeted killings that continue to this day.

Turning her back on her privileged life in Victorian England, Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), fired by her innate curiosity, journeyed the world and became fascinated with all things Arab. Traveling the length and breadth of the Arab region, armed with a love for its language and its people, she not only produced several enormously popular books based on her experiences but became instrumental to the British foreign office. When World War I erupted, and the British needed the loyalty of the Arab leaders, it was Gertrude Bell's work and connections that helped provided the brain for T. E. Lawrence's military brawn.

In late August 2011, Shahbaz Taseer was driving to his office in Lahore when he was dragged from his car at gunpoint and kidnapped by members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a Taliban-affiliated Uzbek terrorist group. Shahbaz’s father, the late Pakistani governor, had recently been assassinated. His crime: speaking in support of a Christian woman who had been accused of blasphemy and sentenced to death.

Narrated through the eyes of the intimates of Suleyman the Magnificent, the sixteenth-century sultan of the Ottoman Empire, The Lion House animates with stunning immediacy the fears and stratagems of those around him: the Greek slave who becomes his Grand Vizier, the Venetian jewel dealer who acts as his go-between, the Russian consort who becomes his wife. Christopher de Bellaigue tells not just the story of rival superpowers, nor of one of the most consequential lives in human history, but of what it means to live in a time when a few men get to decide the fate of the world.

It was just one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that are still felt worldwide today. The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for “casualties.” Award-winning writer Matti Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young Israeli soldiers charged with holding this remote outpost, a task that would change them forever, wound the country in ways large and small, and foreshadow the unwinnable conflicts the United States would soon confront in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

In 1977, Natan Sharansky, a leading activist in the democratic dissident movement in the Soviet Union and the movement for free Jewish emigration, was arrested by the KGB. He spent nine years as a political prisoner, convicted of treason against the state. Never Alone reveals how Sharansky's years in prison, many spent in harsh solitary confinement, prepared him for a very public life after his release. As an Israeli politician and the head of the Jewish Agency, Sharansky brought extraordinary moral clarity and uncompromising, often uncomfortable, honesty.

As the world's attention traces the reluctant social advances in the Middle East, Princess Sultana and her female friends and family have stepped forward to rescue young women in the region who are cruelly mistreated by their husbands, their fathers, and the brutish ISIS soldiers who kidnap them. But inside the Princess' lavish Saudi Arabian palace, sparks of anger and bolts of fear crackle because of the secrets kept to forward her efforts to help women and children.

In 1999, 30-year-old Nada Bakos moved from her lifelong home in Montana to Washington, DC, to join the CIA. Quickly realizing her affinity for intelligence work, Nada was determined to rise through the ranks of the agency first as an analyst and then as a Targeting Officer, eventually finding herself on the frontline of America's War against Islamic extremists. In this role, Nada was charged with determining if Iraq had a relationship with 9/11 and Al-Qaida, and finding the mastermind behind this terrorist activity: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) is generally regarded as the greatest intellectual ever to have appeared in the Arab world - a genius who ranks as one of the world's great minds. Yet the author of the Muqaddima, the most important study of history ever produced in the Islamic world, is not as well known as he should be, and his ideas are widely misunderstood. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides an engaging and authoritative account of Ibn Khaldun's extraordinary life, times, writings, and ideas.

The dramatic memoir of the journalist who was held hostage in a high-security prison in Tehran for 18 months and whose release - which almost didn’t happen - became a part of the Iran nuclear deal.