True stories about Americans who volunteered to serve Israel at the time of her struggle for Independance. Americans can be proud of the military contributions they made to the fledgling zionist state with extremely limited military resources struggling against powerful Arab countries.

EVERY ONE IN THE WORLD SHOULD READ THIS BOOK. YOU CANNOT PUT IT DOWN ONCE YOU START IT. THE AUTHORS HAVE DONE A SUPER JOB IN RESEARCH. ANY ONE THAT HAS EVER BEEN IN AVIATION SHOUL HAVE A GREAT INTEREST IN READING THIS BOOK. SO MANY PEOPLE HAVE NEVER KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WAR IN ISRAEL AND SHOULD KNOW ALL THE FRUSTRATIONS AND FACTS. THE AUTHORS HAVE A TENDENCY TO WANDER BUT THEY HAVE CREATED AN EXCELLENT BOOK.

"If You Could Be My Friend" is a great book to everyone. It can break the highest score by its cover and content. My teacher and I were looking through books at the library, and we came to this book by accident. I really can't tell my feelings while I was reading it. It talks about two girls, one an Israeli and the other a Palestinian. They knew each other through a french journalist.Then they started to send letters to each others from August 1988 talking about the history of their two peoples. Their letters were emotional because both of them were writing of what was happening in their lands because of the war. First, they thought that they could be friends, but after many years, they grew up and changed their minds. Many people were killed from both sides and each one of them started to blame the other. On October 1991, they met in Jerusalem for the first time. I really recommend this book to anyone because the author did a fantastic job writing it. I finished reading it in one day only because I was really interested in it and I didn't feel the time.

I came across this book by accident. It almost brings tears to my eyes just thinking about what I experienced in the pages of this book. This educational treasure cuts through the clutter of daily news and brings you to the personal and political front lines of two girls seperated by war. Somewhere in each letter is the innocence of youth, however at all times there is a learned vehemance budding in every letter. Despite the political barriers between both girls, there is the common denominator of friendship. When they look at each other as Arab and Jewish...they tend to think "She's one of the enemy." However, when they look at each other as Mervet and Galit they tend to think "She is my friend." To me this book is proof that people can learn to celebrate divirsity if they would only stop to listen and talk to each other.

One of the best books written on the conflict. Nur Masalha uses Israeli government archives to examine the idea of "Greater Israel" (uniting Israel proper with the West Bank and Gaza) in Israeli politics. Right wing settlers have long advocated Jewish expansion into the occupied territories as a way of driving the Palestinians out. One has to remember that the current conflict in Israel and Palestine is not only about security, but also about Zionism and expansionism. This book will make you see the conflict in a whole new light.

Masalha focuses on the Israeli policy of dispossession and institutionalized goal of greater Israel or Eretz Israel. He presents irrefutable evidence and sources in support of his assertions which gives the book an undeniable balance. This is not an indictment of the state of Israel. It is simply a record of the policy pursued by Israel through individuals, private groups, and governmental bodies with the overarching objective of disposesing the Palestinians of their properties and then moveing them out of Israel and the occupied territories. Nothing is presented or suggested without proof. Masalha balances his book by also discussing Israeli individuals or organizations that oppose, what most of them rightfully consider as racist, the policies that seek to force the Palestinians off their lands. No student of the Middle East in general, or the Palestinian/Arab-Israeli conflict in particular can afford to neglect reading this book. The failure of the peace process can not be fully understood without learning of the expansionist history of the state of Israel that is presented here. Labor and the Likud, though seemingly on opposite ends of the spectrum in their approach to the peace process, share a common history that sought to realize the Zionist goal of Eretz Israel at the cost of the Palestinians. Masalha also provides a comprehensive listing and a thorough discussion of individuals and groups that have sought to achieve that objective. That information alone gives this book an encyclopedic depth that is invaluable to comprehending the actors involved in the policy of dispossession and diaspora of the Palestinians.

Mr. Pipes, eminent scholear and great inflamicist of Islam most recently completed his book 'militant Islam reaches America' but this book is by far more scholaraly and gives a more complete picture of the Islamic world. This read has several shortcomings. Mr. Pipes attempts to survey many Islamic countries where Islam is the vast majority or the near majority. In these short paragraph length studies he does not touch on one subject that needs to be touched on, namely the fate of minorites in Muslim societies. He does not explain the ethnic cleansing carried out in many Muslim countries that helped create a homogeneity within nations like Turkey. Nevertheless he provides a wonderful appendix that includes a list of Muslim populations of countries throughout the world. What one will realize when reading this list is that the number of minority populations in a Muslim country is directly proportional to the time the country has been Muslim. I recommend this book wholeheartedly in light of our need to understand and critique the Islamic world. A good companion to 'The Rage and the Pride'.

Few writers, Thomas W. Lippman wrote in the Washington Post, have explained so lucidly the complex developments of Muslim history.

It is difficult to address the questions of Islam, the Arabs and their relations with Israel and remain nonpartisan. But Business Week's Ronald Taggiasco called Pipes' scholarly explanation of events and faith in that little-known, volatile, and important part of the world well worth reading.

Pipes' reasoned, literate explanation of what generated the Islamic resurgence goes a long way to explaining recent events. Written in 1983, this book provided the first comprehensive political study of Islam's extraordinary role in modern world. We are fortunate indeed that Transaction has rescued the political and global implications of the Islamic revival, revealed here, from the out-of-print category, complete with a new preface for 2002.

The book is divided into three sections. The first covers the premodern legacy of Islam's sacred laws and its failure to implement the public ideal represented by those laws--as existed in the single state for Muslims (Dar al-Islam) from 622 to 753 A.D. According to Pipes, for most of Muslim history, traditional Muslims were willing to accept the gap between the ideal and the actual, to live with a less-than-complete implementation of Shari'a, although the Muslim approach to politics derived from the "invariant premises of the religion" established more than 1,500 years ago.

The second section covers Islam's encounters with the West, beginning with the matched powers of Crusaders against the Ayyubids, and proceeding quickly to Napoleon's 1789 invasion of Egypt. (This prompted the Ottoman Sultan Selim III to declare Jihad against the French and join the infidel British and Russian empires to keep his own in tact).

Muslims had ruled millions of Christians in Europe for 450 years before being displaced by Turkey. Then the western cultural onslaught began in the first half of the 18th century, and ran from Umma's eastern end (China and Indonesia) to its west (Crimea). By the end of 1919, only Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Arabia and Yemen retained political independence, the first three by balancing the claims of Britain against those of Russia and the latter two simply by being remote and completely barren. Meanwhile, the Muslim Empire had also lost battles of scientific, technical, mechanical, geographic and historical knowledge. Even daily Western life differed markedly from that of the Islamic east. Thus fundamentalists began lobbying for strict Shari'a everywhere in the Umma.

In contrast, reformist Muslims argue that traditional Shari'a is hopelessly illiberal and conflicts with the true Qur'anic values. They reject Shari'a traditions emanating from Hadith, consensus of the 'ulama and reasoning by analogy as inauthentic and outdated, respectively. Similarly, they approve of parliamentary systems of government, but view hold their record in Islamic society in contempt. On some fronts, liberal views conflict with themselves. While they admire pan-Islamic solidarity they are not committed to it; and they recognize national interests but disapprove of Muslim states fighting one another. And as for non-Muslims, according to Pipes, reformists are caught by ambiguity, between their desire for equal status for all and the wish for Dhimmi laws that traditional Islamic states use to bestow a special place on Muslims, while relegating all non-Muslims to inferior, even slavish conditions. The fact that Westernization did not markedly improve the Muslim world in the 1970s led to increasing fundamentalism.

Pipes devotes the third section to Islam in current affairs, detailing the effects of the fundamentalist surge on 22 Muslim-dominated nations from Indonesia, Afghanistan and Pakistan in Central Asia and Asia to Algeria, Morocco and Egypt in Africa and Syria, Iran and Iraq, in the Middle East. In at least 8 other nations, from Malaysia to Nigeria, Muslims vie with non-Muslims for power. In one of these--the Sudan--the conflict has grown bloody since this book was written, forcing millions into subjugation and slavery. Pipes also reviews 20 areas, including the former Soviet Union, where Muslims account for less than a quarter of the population but are asserting themselves. Pipes includes an extensive 50-plus page look at the means that the oil boom provided to promote Islam. Oil is behind the political importance of Saudi Arabia, and the Iranian Revolution, for example.

But Pipes also concludes that an Islamic revival dependant on oil constitutes a mirage, for the cash that oil provides cannot last forever. This, Pipes predicts, will leave the Islamic world with a choice that has become increasingly urgent--to adapt and come to terms with global Westernization, or to accept apologetics, introversion and poverty.

This broad treatment remains as helpful in understanding current events as when it was written nearly 20 years ago. Alyssa A. Lappen

Author William Daugherty provides the reader with a review of the incidents leading up to the 1979 taking of American hostages from the American embassy in Iran. The first nine chapters provide you with background information regarding the shah and relations between the the United States and Iran. The author then provides us with details regarding the taking of the embassy by the Iranians, their unskilled attempts at questioning him, the food they were provided to eat, and their movement from one place to another. Author Daugherty believes the embassy would not have been taken over by the Iranians if the shah had come directly to the U.S. from Iran in 1979 for medican treatment. However, it was a mistake to let the shah "roam the world for ten months" before entering the U.S. that led the embassy to be taken over by the Iranians. Bitterness towards then President Carter was in the minds of the former hostages when released. Carter addressed the former hostages and took a few polite questions until a State Department officer commented that the embassy had provided plenty of advance warning of what would happen if the shah entered the United States. Mr. Carter then looked to the floor, raised his head and smiled, and said he wanted his picture taken with each of them. Thus ended the meeting. The author does, however, praise Mr. Carter for his volunteer work since leaving office. The author also does a great job in providing examples of discussions with the Iranian guards and the futility of dealing with people who have closed minds. The Iranians somehow believed that the removal of President Carter in favor of Ronald Reagan would help their cause. They assumed that anyone who was Carter's opponent would be their friend. This despite the fact they were holding Americans against their will, claiming America was their enemy, and desecrating the American flag. I don't have time to list any additional examples here, but page 163 provides an outstanding example of the logic of their reasoning regarding stopping for a traffic light at 2:00 a.m.

How can I most effectively resist my captors without being self destructive? This seminal question was answered by Stockdale in Hanoi, taught by Hegdahl in Navy Survival School, and practiced by Daugherty in Tehran. The lessons are all the more important today in our campaign against world terrorists. Once a master of resistance, Daugherty had become a master story teller and his book rings true.This is a must read for anyone going into combat and those who support them.

My review is based on 2,221 days experience as a prisoner of the Communist North Vietnamese and 5,475 days as a clinical social worker working mostly with veterans and active duty personnel.

At the very beginning of Stephens' travelogue, he explains to the careful reader the methodology he used to validate the legitimacy of his writing. I thought it brazen of him, and since he falsified this "rationalization for writing" under such a guise, at times I did not know whether to believe him or not. He did have a quaint deadpan, tongue-in-cheek demeanor.
I thought it funny that just after our returning from Poughkeepsie, (New York) I was reading about his traveling through Poughkeepsie!
Little nuances such as "... with all the extravagance of Eastern hyperbole..." (page 233) dot the pages.
Throughout the book, there are many wonderful learning experiences such as "...I remember I had a long discourse about the difference between the camel and the dromedary. Buffon gives the camel two humps, and the dromedary one; and this, I believe is the received opinion, as it had always been mine; but, since I had been in the East, I had remarked that it was exceedingly rare to meet a camel with two humps. I had seen together at one time, on the starting of the caravan of pilgrims to Mecca, perhaps twenty thousand camels and dromedaries, and had not seen among them more than half a dozen with two humps. Not satisified with any explanation from European residents or travelers, I had inquired among the Bedouins; and Toualeb, my old guide, brought up among camels, had given such a strange account that I never paid any regard to it. Now, however, the sheik told me the same thing, namely, that they were of different races, the dromedary being to the camel as the blood-horse is to the cart-horse; and that the two humps were peculiar neither to the dromedary nor the camel, or natural to either; but that both are always born with only one hump, which, being a mere mass of flesh, and very tender, almost as soon as the young camel is born a piece is sometimes cut out of the middle for the covenience of better arranging the saddle; and, being cut out of the center, a hump is left on either side of the cavity; and this, according to the account given by Toualeb, is the only way in which two humps ever appear on the back of a camel or dromedary. I should not mention this story if I had heard it only once; but, precisely as I had it from Toualeb, it was confirmed with a great deal of circumstantial detail by another Bedouin, who, like himself, had lived among camels and dromedaries all his life; and his statement was assented to by all his companions. I do not vie this out as a discovery made at this late day in regard to an animal so well known as the camel; indeed, I am told that the Arabs are not ignorant of that elegance of civilized life called "quizzing." I give it merely to show how I wiled away my time in the desert, and for what it is worth.2 In spite of Stephens' information, zoologists still classify camels as Dromedary (one hump) and Bactrian (two humps)." (Pages 241-242).
I never quite understood the evacuation and continuous abandonment of Petra until Stephens stated: '...in reference to the interpretation of the prophecy, "None shall pass through it for ever and ever,'I can say that I have passed through the land of Idumea..."(Page 306)."...because the Bedouins would always be lying in wait for travelers..." (Page 266.)
Do absorb the explanation and vivid description of POOLS OF SOLOMON on page 327 and The traditions of prayer at The Wailing Wall on pages 368-369.
I had just gotten half-way through this book the night (5-27-02) my father own died, and how I wished that I could be able to share my findings, my questions I need answered, and discuss this book with him!

Mr. Sthepens was a great traveler and writer too, he made easy to follow his travels and gave his very personal point of view ot those days. In particular I like his graphic description of the conditions that people lived in the past. I recomend it to everybody all ages.

I was confused when I started this book because I was expecting a more conventional narrative. However, the style and beauty of the writing was captivating. Full of flashbacks, trains of thought and bits of remembered conversation, if you read it with the view of immersing yourself in the world of the heroine, the story makes complete sense and stays hauntingly in your memory. One of the surprises is that, though you think the heroine is the only one harmed by the religious conventions of her day, you come to realize that her husband has been equally harmed. Terribly sad and beautiful, but vivid and fascinating.

I think it was very good bok, i 'd like to have informasjon about tis bokk and women on the zero point

Hilal Khashan, Lebanon's leading pollster, has written a cogent book that provided me with deep theoretical and methodological insights during the preparation of my Ph.D. thesis. In fact, many researchers on education employing the content analysis approach to confessional pluralism in Lebanon find this impressive empirical work useful to uncover the complex set of aggregated political factors which are pronounced and perhaps reproduced in this country's educational policies and practices. Judged by the sheer mass of new data and complex analysis which Professor Khashan provides, this book represents a major contribution to the understanding of the subtle and complex nature of the confessional conflict in Lebanon. This monograph has a twofold objective; first, it reviews some interesting methodological issues; and second, it presents the cornucopia of original findings reported by the author. The title of the book signifies a relatively new approach to research on the roots of the corrosive confessional conflict in Lebanon. This approach incorporates a range of theoretical perspectives and original quantitative-qualitative research techniques.... Khashan's work transcends all other works on Lebanon by the quality and comprehensiveness of his data, as well as the sophisticated statistical techniques which he expertly utilizes. This is a truly an unsurpassed book on Lebanese society. It tackles without apology difficult issues which most Lebanese do not like to discuss or even admit. ...Khashan's incorporation of regression analysis filled much of the gap caused by the paucity of empirical data on Lebanon's political viability. Shortage of statistics as those generated by the author in the past tended to stymie research on politics in Lebanon. In this book Khashan has addressed the political arena of Lebanon from a wholly new perspective for which he must be commended. Any observer of post-Tai'f Lebanese politics will readily endorse the author's conclusions and approve of his recommendations. This work shall continue to guide scholars surfeited of research in their own field into provocative horizons. Kamal E. Abouchedid, PhD., Center for Ethnic Studies in Education, The University of Manchester, UK.

With this, his name-making book, Hilal Khashan offers insightful analysis of the Lebanese predicament as manifested by the Lebanese themselves. He is to be commended for his courageous and path-breaking study. Professor Khashan has done what no other specialist on Lebanon has dared or could articulate before -- he has the presented the bitter facts as they are. This is one of the very few books on Lebanon that will guide us to a better understanding of Lebanese politics in the next millenium and beyond!

The Insight Guide to Turkey has breathtaking photos, and exceptionally well-written essays about the country, its history, geography, politics and peoples.

I read this book in preparing to host a Turk at my house. I was seeking an appreciation of the country and its culture. What I got was a fascinating read (I couldn't put it down) and a very balanced view, in addition to a great history lesson. I am left with a desire to see this country and meet its people!

Insight guides offer a rich history, political analysis and cultural insight to the countries they cover. By using locally based writers they get the insiders view of what the various camps believe in. For a discerning traveller who wants to know about the country, the people, geography, food, industry etc and for those who wish to travel independently, this is the book to read. It is not tourist guide which says stay here, eat this menu, see this statue. All that is left to the standard tourist guide writers. If you never travel to a country, you can know it through the insight guide. Because Muslim and Turkish cultures are so different from ours (and Turkish is different to Arabic Muslim) it is important to be aware of the behaviours that are considered polite and those that are considered to be rude. This book equips you to deal courteously with salesmen who would be considered pushy by western standards. Did you know for instance that it is rude to kiss your partner in the street in Turkey (or any muslim country) even if it is only a peck on the cheek -whereas it is polite for men to kiss each other in public. Why were Turks feared by all of Europe for seven hundred years? Why do the Greeks still hate them with such passion (if you want to insult a Greek just call him a Turk and see the reaction). For depth of analysis on culture, history and geography, to understand what makes the people tick, you should read this book. Then if you travel to Turkey you may, like me, find the Turks to be the friendliest people you have ever met. You may also understand why such friendly people are capable of being represented in quite a different way in Movies like Midnight Express. Vive la difference!

I read the history background like a novel. The cultural information such as the drama, the dances, the religion, the art etc. is great. The photos are great too. I am back from Bali and I just take this book with me.

Insight Guide Bali is an exceptional travel guide. The history is well written and rich with interesting facts. I reads like a good novel. The maps are deteiled with plenty of cross references. There are plenty of travel tips from riding a bus to how to order food without MSGS. It appears that every possible travel issue has been addressed; from how not to get arrested to finding the swank resorts. The book is worth the price just for the exquisite pictures. I have never seen a travel book with photos as exceptional as these. Usually I purchase a couple of guide books before going to a new location, but this time I will only use the Insight Guide Bali.