by Amir Taheri | Aug 31, 2017 | Book Reviews
DESTROYING A NATION The Civil War in Syria By: Nikolas Van Dam Published by I.B. Tauris, London, 2017 The blurb of this new book on Syria presents the author, Nikolas Van Dam, as an experienced Dutch diplomat with a direct knowledge of the Middle East. Having served...
by Amir Taheri | May 28, 2016 | Book Reviews
Centres of Cataclysm: Celebrating Fifty Years of Modern Poetry in Translation Edited by Sasha Dugdale, David Constantine and Helen Constantine Published by Bloodaxe Books, London, 2016 In his seminal study of translation, “Mouse or Rat?” the late Italian linguist and...
by Amir Taheri | Mar 19, 2016 | Book Reviews
Aleppo: The Rise and Fall of Syria’s Great Merchant City, Philip Mansel, 238 pages, I.B. Tauris, London, 2016 In a bizarre coincidence, this fascinating portrayal of Aleppo, one of the Middle East’s most fascinating cities, came out exactly on the day that Russian...
by Amir Taheri | Sep 30, 2015 | Book Reviews
The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria By Samar Yazbek Rider Books, 280 pages London, 2015 “The world has abandoned us!” This is the tragic message that comes out of Samar Yazbek’s fascinating reportage from what she describes as “the shattered heart...
by Amir Taheri | Sep 14, 2015 | Book Reviews
Khomeini, de Sade, and Me By Abnousse Shalmani Grasset, 177 pages Paris, 2014 If we are to believe Abnousse Shalmani, being a woman is hard work even in Western democracies boasting of gender equality and human rights. It is even harder in contemporary Iran where a...
by Amir Taheri | Sep 3, 2015 | Book Reviews
[inset_left]The PersianAlexander Ilichevsky610 pagesMoscow, 2015[/inset_left] Ever wondered what happened to those thick Russian novels with dramatis personae large enough to populate the whole of Siberia? Well, decades of revolution, terror, war, and semi-chaos left...
