Notes on a Century
Reflections of A Middle East Historian
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The memoirs of the greatest historian of the Middle East, Professor Bernard Lewis.
After 9/11, people who had never given much thought to the politics of the Middle East found themselves wondering why there was such rage brewing in the region. Many of them turned to Bernard Lewis for an explanation. The world's pre-eminent historian of the Middle East, Lewis was among the first to identify the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism.
In this exceptional memoir, he looks back over his long career - taking us from his discovery of the Crusades, as a young boy in London, and his service in British intelligence during the Second World War, through to the Iraq wars, the crisis with Iran, and the great upheavals of the Arab Spring.
Over the course of his distinguished career, he has at times been as much a player in political events as well as a scholar. He has advised monarchs, presidents, prime ministers and dissidents in the Middle East and elsewhere. Now 95, and still sharper than most college students, he writes with barbed wit about the people he has known and the events he has witnessed and participated in. No subject is more fraught in the Middle East than history - and so Bernard Lewis has found himself unexpectedly part of the story that he tells in this extraordinary memoir of a life that spans the 20th century, and has already had a great impact on the 21st.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lewis, the 95-year-old dean of Middle Eastern studies, has never been one to back down from a fight. The Princeton professor has been lionized for his great erudition and savaged for what critics see as profoundly simplistic and solipsistic commentary on modern events and for adhering to outdated methods and assumptions. Now he revisits forgotten grievances, settles old scores, and spins yarns of his war years as one would with one's grandchildren. Suffused with a possibly ironic superciliousness (he talks of how his grandfather "begat" his progeny), his memoir seems to lack all sense of proportion, casting equally polemical and venomous brickbats at the student who consulted him but didn't include him in his acknowledgments as at the French court that fined him for casting doubt on the Armenian genocide, at the time a major international incident. He says he was displeased with the invasion of Iraq, thinking that Iran would have been the more appropriate target. An intellectual of Lewis's stature can, at this stage of his life, be forgiven for publishing such a confused, meandering, and self-serving account of his own career, but it is not clear why anyone should want to read it.
