CATEGORY

Pertinent, scholarly, and irreverent—a uniquely ambitious and enthralling insight into the making of the world's most fraught arena.

The seeds of conflict in the Middle East were sown in the first sixty years of the twentieth century. It was then that the Western powers—Britain, France, and the United States—discovered the imperatives for interventions that have plunged the region into crisis ever since. It was also then that most of the region's modern-day states were created and their regimes forged—and their management by the West earned abiding resentment.

Sowing the Wind tells how and why this happened. The subject is essentially painful and somber, but John Keay illuminates it with lucid analysis and sparkling anecdotes set within a narrative of improbable richness and eloquence. This is that rarest of works, a history with humor, an epic with attitude, a dirge that delights. 16 pages of illustrations.