Middle East
Little known in America but venerated as a martyr in Iran, Howard Baskerville was a twenty-two-year-old Christian missionary from South Dakota who traveled to Persia (modern-day Iran) in 1907 for a two-year stint teaching English and preaching the gospel. He arrived in the midst of a democratic revolution--the first of its kind in the Middle East--led by a group of brilliant young firebrands committed to transforming their country into a fully self-determining, constitutional monarchy, one with free elections and an independent parliament.
The Persian students Baskerville educated in English in turn educated him about their struggle for democracy, ultimately inspiring him to leave his teaching post and join them in their fight against a tyrannical shah and his British and Russian backers. "The only difference between me and these people is the place of my birth," Baskerville declared, "and that is not a big difference."
In 1909, Baskerville was killed in battle alongside his students, but his martyrdom spurred on the revolutionaries who succeeded in removing the shah from power, signing a new constitution, and rebuilding parliament in Tehran. To this day, Baskerville's tomb in the city of Tabriz remains a place of pilgrimage. Every year, thousands of Iranians visit his grave to honor the American who gave his life for Iran.
In this rip-roaring tale of his life and death, Aslan gives us a powerful parable about the universal ideals of democracy--and to what degree Americans are willing to support those ideals in a foreign land. Woven throughout is an essential history of the nation we now know as Iran--frequently demonized and misunderstood in the West. Indeed, Baskerville's life and death represent a "road not taken" in Iran. Baskerville's story, like his life, is at the center of a whirlwind in which Americans must ask themselves: How seriously do we take our ideals of constitutional democracy and whose freedom do we support?
Why did Hamas attack? What is Israel trying to achieve? Did this catastrophe have to happen? And is there a way forward? The book's expert contributors address these and other questions, which have never been more urgent.
In September 2023, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan boasted that the Middle East "is quieter today than it has been in two decades." One week later, unprecedented violence in Gaza and Israel shattered the status quo and shocked the world.
Hamas's Operation Al-Aqsa Deluge punctured delusions of stability as hundreds of militants burst forth from the Gaza prison camp. In the ensuing carnage and firefights, 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds more taken hostage.
Israel's retaliation turned the besieged enclave into a howling wasteland. Nearly 30,000 people were killed in four months, including more than 12,000 children, and over 60 percent of homes were damaged or destroyed. Israel targeted the wounded and infirm, newborns and near-dead, as Gaza's healthcare system-hospitals, clinics, ambulances, medical personnel--came under a systematic attack unprecedented in the annals of modern warfare.
The Hamas massacre and the genocidal Israeli campaign which followed together mark a historic turning point in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The reverberations have also shaken politics far beyond, not least in Europe and the United States, where gigantic, round-the-clock protests for Palestinian rights pitted politicians against the public and exposed a growing statist authoritarianism.
In this groundbreaking book--the first published about the 2023 Gaza war--leading Palestinian, Israeli, and international authorities put these momentous developments in context and provide an initial taking-stock.
Contributors: Musa Abuhashhash, Ahmed Alnaouq, Nathan J. Brown, Yaniv Cogan, Clare Daly MEP, Talal Hangari, Khaled Hroub, R. J., Colter Louwerse, Mitchell Plitnick, Mouin Rabbani, Sara Roy, and Avi Shlaim
"Here are tender, lyrical, colorful stories of an Iran that Americans do not know and have no way of discovering directly. Tara Kangarlou has created a work of people-to-people diplomacy, using her words to paint pictures of a very different country than the harsh, angry land depicted in the news. If only Iranians could read a similar account of the Heartbeat of the United States!"―Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO, New America
"With all of the talk about Iran, we hear far too little about the stories of the Iranian people themselves. The Heartbeat of Iran gives us the individual stories of Iranians - an illuminating and powerful portrait of a people who have been so often mischaracterized, and whose voices deserve to be heard."―Ben Rhodes, author of The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House
"In no other time in history has there been such need for building bridges and closing the divides. Tara Kangarlou's Heartbeat Of Iran takes us to a country that has long been isolated and enables us to see Iran through its heart and soul -- its people."―Margot Wallström, former Foreign Minister Of Sweden
"Tara Kangarlou's The Heartbeat Of Iran is an impressive, unique, and much needed addition to the compendium of literature on Iran. Using the personal stories of ordinary individuals, she brings to life the Iranian people--a people much misunderstood (and even maligned) in the west--and allows them their own voice in showing us what makes them who they are."―Hooman Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ
In today's interconnected global village, Iran remains a mystery to much of the rest of the world--especially to those living in the United States and the west. While the country is often synonymous with rogue behavior on the world stage, there is also another, rarely seen side to this nation of 80 million, including being home to the greatest number of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel, and having the largest transsexual population in the region, among other unexpected surprises.
The Heartbeat of Iran takes us on a journey into everyday life in Iran, where we meet the diverse people who make up the country's delicate socio-cultural, political, and religious mosaic. Through textured portraits of regular Iranians--from a blind Sunni environmental activist to the gay son of a general, from Iran's first female race car driver to a young rabbi who is training the future generation of Jewish rabbis in Israel's enemy state--The Heartbeat of Iran reveals a people whose dreams and fears mirror that of millions of others worldwide, and who yearn to join an international community that often views them through the blur of a hostile political fog.
A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, "in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone." Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi's great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members--mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists--The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.