Is this the moment we all have been waiting for?
This is a brief look into the end-of-the-world theology, its oral history, and a few thoughts along the way.
war
Book Review: The Great War for Civilisation
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by the seasoned author and journalist, Robert Fisk is a compilation of his over 30 years of on-field experiences in the various war zones around the Mediterranean and Middle East. The result is comprehensive portrait from a litany of primary sources that makes this book a definitive work.
This work is difficult, challenging and long, but worth every word. One cannot read this in one, or even two sittings. Nor can it be read for great lengths of time because the dark corners of humanity are ever present in this book. Such imagery requires one to pause repeatedly and escape from such realities.
Fisk purposely over-documented The Great War for Civilisation. There is no other choice for the author to do this as detractors, especially those of government, military and enforcement institutions, would like to refute such findings and discredit him personally. The greatest strength of his book is the documentation that takes it out of the realm of his personal opinion and into the place of factual history. It is a work that has been sorely lacking in this genre.
Book Review: My Promised Land
My Promised Land is a controversial, thought provoking and important read for those wanting to understand the Middle East from an Israeli perspective.
The well known Israeli journalist, Ari Shavit, weaves a delicate story of the ever changing doctrine of Zionism from its utopian non-sectarian, communist vision of the early 1900s to its current identity of self-preservation. He shows a modern Israel stripped of its stereotypes and what it really is — a country mired in an identity crisis. A place that is part-libertarian, hedonist, Orthodox, Western European, Middle Eastern, and everything inbetween. These competing forces along with the ominous threat of a much larger Arab community around them leads Shavit to be cynical of Israel’s future.