From Beirut to Jerusalem: Revised Edition,   ISBN:9780374158958

Customer Rating: 

This is one of the first books that I read trying to get up to speed on the modern day dispute between the nation of Israel and the Arabs. It has a great chronological outline. It is entertaining and informative. It is also thoughtful if not very hopeful. The author's stay in Beirut is enough for me not to want to fly over there on my next vacation. His report highlights the nature of a place where violence has become the ruling authority.

The author, of course, feels that he is being objective and he is - if you basically consider the Arabs to be a totally whacked out, insane group of people who are impossible to deal with and are bent of the total destruction of Israel and maybe the world.

He concludes the book by saying in a round-a-bout way that the only solution is a decisive and all out war between the Jews and the Arabs. There is basically no satifactory compromise - one or the other must be vanquished.

He tries hard not to come to such a conclusion all through the book but by the time we get through all the modern history, this is basically the final conclusion.

I feel that no matter who you read on the subject you will not find an objective, impartial interpretation. You can try Alan Dersherwhitz or Noam Chomsky or Jimmy Carter. Actually though at the name of Jimmy Carter most people jump out of their political skins, but he may be the most objective and hopeful. He is not a Jew and he is not an Arab. He is a Christian though and on top of that he seems to be bent on peace as a realistic possibility. That's his problem, I suppose.

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Customer Rating: 

I recommend this book whole heartedly by the fact that I consider it a classic by the way it helps the non-Middle Easterner understand how Lebanese Arabs and Israeli Jews actually think. In the events surrounding Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1983 the reader sees into the way that the different partys and religious groups manipulated one another to accomplish their objectives, and how the Isrealis and the Americans were mislead at times. Friedman does a masterful job. It is a must read for the person interested in about or living in that area of the world.

Customer Rating: 

This was my first look into the world of books on CD's & it was fair. The story was one that was recommended to me but I was not overly impressed. It felt more like a propanganda peice rather than true journelism. If you like the Middle East then you should enjoy this too.

Customer Rating: 

If you only want to read one book on the Middle East, this is it. Despite all the press devoted to this area, the media does not offer context. This book does. It's an incredibly fast read and will open your eyes. Visit Apellicon's book recommendation site to read more reviews and see more book lists by category.

Customer Rating: 

I apologize for the length of this review, but it's hard to condense all that is wrong with a Thomas Friedman book into a few short paragraphs.

This book is basically a memoir and reflection on Thomas Friedman's time in Lebanon and Israel as a New York Times reporter, from 1979 to 1989. It is not completely useless, but I do not recommend it because the weaknesses far outweigh the strengths, and 500 pages are too many to get the few interesting bits scattered throughout. Freidman's style is obnoxious, his assertions are unsupported, his chronology is meandering, and his conclusions are without merit.

Why would someone pick up a book about the Middle East? To learn about history, or culture, or about perennial political problems -- all of which interest me greatly. But this book isn't about any of those things. Consider the very first sentence: "In June 1979, my wife, Ann, and I boarded a red-and-white Middle East Airlines 707 in Geneva for the four-hour flight to Beirut." In one short sentence are five completely useless details. I don't care what Friedman's wife's name is, or what color his airplane was, or what airline he used, or how big the plane was, or the city where he had a connecting flight, or how long it takes to get from Switzerland to Lebanon. A good writer knows the importance of detail, to be sure, but it's the telling detail that matters. This book is not about the Lebanese civil war; it's about Tom Friedman reporting on the civil war. It's not about the intifada; it's about Tom Friedman's generalizations about the intifada. No matter how momentous the historical events he describes, Friedman is always the star of the show.

He isn't a very interesting star, either. I'm not just talking about mixed metaphors (on page 2, he mentions a "multicolored river of humanity that flowed through [Jerusalem's] maze of alleyways," because apparently people are water, water flows through mazes, and alleyways look like the front of David Bowie's castle in Labyrinth). I mean he concedes from the outset that he doesn't have anything to offer: "I had decided that the academic ivory tower was not for me and that if I was ever going to be able to hold my own on the Middle East, I had to live there and experience the place firsthand." P. 7. Even if we assume for some reason that academics can't or don't live in the Middle East, the statement is disturbing because Friedman admits he cranked a thick book out of nothing more than an exotic residence (it's certainly not his language skills. He mistranslates the phrase "alhan wa-sahlan" (p. 104), doesn't know Hebrew (p. 411) and, shockingly, calls a friend of his "Abdul" (p. 25)). Okay, he also spoke to some interesting people along the way, but he's a reporter. A reporter's job is to ask knowledgeable people questions, and write down the responses.

That's not to say reporters aren't entitled to share their opinions -- of course they are. But opinions about the Middle East are far more informative when backed up with facts. This book has virtually no citations. Western observers "assume that all the surface trappings of nation-statehood -- the parliaments, the flags, and the democratic rhetoric -- can fully explain the politics of these countries" (p. 103), according to whom? Did Friedman conduct a poll? Or does he just presume to speak for "most Westerners"? If that sounds presumptuous, it is far, far worse when he claims that Yasser Arafat "can never fully understand the needs and feelings of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, because he has never been one of them" (p. 422). Arafat can't possibly understand Israeli Palestinians, but Friedman is somehow qualified to write hundreds of pages on the causes, meanings, failures and future of the intifada? Please.

I also found Friedman's sympathy for Arafat's cause (even if Arafat's understanding was at sub-Friedman levels) noxious. Shortly after a rapturous review of Arafat's leadership qualities(pp. 116-17), not diminished in the least by the PLO's kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes in Munich (p. 119, the massacre "kept the Palestinian cause relevant," nothing more), Freidman asserts that Arafat didn't share in the widespread PLO corruption (p. 121). No citation, of course. Friedman's boot-licking is made almost comical in light of his admission that Beirut's "international press corps" was "generally uncritical" (p. 119).

The primary problem with this book is, stated simply, a lack of command of important facts, which leads to over-generalizations and a total lack of confidence in Friedman's conclusions and the significance he attributes to his observations (like when he spends ten pages trying to interpret a pork chop. Seriously). He claims that for the first 200 years after independence, the U.S. had only two serious foreign engagements: the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War (p. 205). The War of 1812, the Barabary Wars and the undeclared war with France were perhaps insufficiently "serious" for Friedman's tastes, although British soldiers burning the White House strikes me as fairly serious. On the same page, Friedman claims America had "no real need ... to learn the seamier dimensions of diplomacy, espionage, and covert operations." Nowhere does Friedman betray the smallest indication of familiarity with Thomas Jefferson's diplomatic trip to France, of the names of spies like Benedict Arnold, John Andre, Edward Bancroft, Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow, or Lafayette Baker.

I admit I'm cheating a little bit, here. Other than Benedict Arnold, the other names in that list are not exactly household words. I can't really fault Friedman for not knowing them -- he's a Middle East reporter, not a historian of post-Revolutionary America. But that's exactly my point. He isn't a Middle East historian, either. Or a political science expert. Or a linguist. Or an ethnologist. Or an expert on anything, really, other than newspapers (I assume). The most interesting and thought-provoking parts of this book consist entirely of quotations or paraphrases of other people.

I still give this book two stars, rather than one, because it is not completely worthless. During his decade in the Middle East, Friedman talked to some interesting people, and saw some interesting things. Peppered throughout the book are little vignettes, the slices of life, stories about people and events that go beyond what you will see in the average history book. It is one thing to read that Hafez Assad butchered 20,000 of his own citizens in the city of Hama. It is something else to read the details of an entire neighborhood that was literally flattened by heavy machinery, along with its former residents. Friedman's account of the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla are more evocative than a bare report of the number of people who died.

But such gems are too few and far between. I do not recommend this book.