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Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian by Bernard Lewis, Buntzie Ellis Churchill
bookshelves: summer-2015, history, autobiography-memoir, tbr-busting-2015, jewish, muslim, under-500-ratings, dodgy-narrator, historical-masturbation, holocaust-genocide
Read from January 31, 2013 to August 16, 2015
Read by Buntzie Ellis Churchill
Playing Time........ 13:04:30
Description: Lewis was the first to warn of a coming "clash of civilizations," a term he coined in 1957, and has led an amazing life, as much a political actor as a scholar of the Middle East. In this witty memoir he reflects on the events that have transformed the region since World War II, up through the Arab Spring.
A pathbreaking scholar with command of a dozen languages, Lewis has advised American presidents and dined with politicians from the shah of Iran to the pope. Over the years, he had tea at Buckingham Palace, befriended Golda Meir, and briefed politicians from Ted Kennedy to Dick Cheney. No stranger to controversy, he pulls no punches in his blunt criticism of those who see him as the intellectual progenitor of the Iraq war. Like America’s other great historian-statesmen Arthur Schlesinger and Henry Kissinger, he is a figure of towering intellect and a world-class raconteur, which makes Notes on a Century essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of the Middle East.
'MI5 stops others doing to us what MI6 is doing to others'
Table of Contents:
01 Early Days
02 The War Years
03 In the Ottoman Archives
04 Cultural Diplomacy
05 Why Study History?
06 Episodes in an Academic Life
07 Crossing the Atlantic
08 The Neighborhood
09 The Clash of Civilizations
10 Orientalism and the Cult of Right Thinking
11 Judgment in Paris
12 Writing and Rewriting History
13 Politics and the Iraq War
Fascination fayre indeed. Fully recommended with the caveat that Lewis has been flip-flopper, hawk, and Armenian Holocaust denier, so his views do not sit so well with my personal taste."It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
― Aristotle, Metaphysics
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