Research Catalog

Title

Sandcastles : the Arabs in search of the modern world / by Milton Viorst.

Author

Viorst, Milton.

Publication

New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xiv, 414 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• A Single "Arab nation" has never existed, not even a thousand years ago, when the Arabs, driven by a rigorous new faith, conquered the Middle East and North Africa. Today, two hundred million Arabs share a language and a variety of historical experiences, the culture of Islam - and a deep-seated uncertainty about their place in a world changing at terrifying speed.
• In the midst of war, enormous economic disparities, personal and ideological rivalries and threats from the outside, the Arabs are searching for their place in the modern world.
• It is this search that Milton Viorst examines in Sandcastles. Drawing upon his long personal experience in the Middle East and many recent trips undertaken as a correspondent for The New Yorker, he takes us deep into the aspirations, fears, prejudices, hopes and convictions of the inhabitants of seven key countries, and of the people without a country - the Palestinians. What emerges is a profoundly perceptive picture of the Arabs as they have been, as they are, and as they may become.
• Viorst takes us first to Baghdad, an ancient city of art, literature and lost grandeur, whose hopes for a renaissance have been crushed by tyranny and war. We travel then to Istanbul, capital of an empire that for centuries ruled the Arabs, leaving them with a taste for Islamic zealotry, strong coffee and political despotism.
• In Cairo, Viorst's fascinating series of talks with the Nobel laureate novelist Naguib Mahfouz illuminates the despair of Egypt; in Damascus, we are offered a frightening insight into the autocracy of Hafez al-Assad, who sees himself as heir to the legendary warrior Saladin.
• In sorting out Lebanon's political and religious factions, Viorst shows us how a civilized society, in submitting to baser passions, careened to the edge of self-destruction. Among the displaced Palestinians, jammed into the camps of Gaza or tenuously clinging to life in shabby West Bank towns, he finds prospects of a better life suffocated by military occupation and stone-throwing anger.
• In surprising revelations on the origins of the Gulf war, Viorst describes an oil-fed greed that made Kuwait the enemy of most Arab nations, notably Iraq, while in the desert kingdom of Jordan, he tells how a king descended from Mohammed experiments with democracy to keep fundamentalists at bay.
• A return to Iraq after the Gulf war yields a report on the melancholy of a people whose leader seems to invite still more destruction upon them, and the book closes with a crisply up-to-date account of the Israeli-PLO settlement and its consequences.
• Balanced and thought-provoking, and at the same time wonderfully alive with fresh and insightful reporting, Sandcastles is an exceptional book, essential for understanding the desperate efforts of a people with an illustrious past to restore the prospect of a bountiful future.

Subject

• Arab countries > Description and travel

Note

• Includes index.

ISBN

0679405992 :

LCCN

93002540

OCLC

ocm28292653

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries