Download or read book My House in Damascus written by Diana Darke and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ongoing conflict in Syria has made clear just how limited the general knowledge of Syrian society and history is in the West. For those watching the headlines and wondering what led the nation to this point, and what might come next, this book is a perfect place to start developing a deeper understanding. Based on decades of living and working in Syria, My House in Damascus offers an inside view of Syria’s cultural and complex religious and ethnic communities. Diana Darke, a fluent Arabic speaker who moved to Damascus in 2004 after decades of regular visits, details the ways that the Assad regime, and its relationship to the people, differs from the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya—and why it was thus always less likely to collapse quickly, even in the face of widespread unrest and violence. Through the author’s firsthand experiences of buying and restoring a house in the old city of Damascus, which she later offered as a sanctuary to friends, Darke presents a clear picture of the realities of life on the ground and what hope there is for Syria’s future.
Download or read book Damascus written by Ross Burns and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-06-11 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lavishly illustrated with beautiful photographs and original plans, traces the story of this colourful, significant and complex place through its physical development and provides, for the first time in English, a compelling and unique exploration of a.
Download or read book A Disappearance in Damascus written by Deborah Campbell and published by Picador. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Winner of the Freedom to Read Award Winner of the Hubert Evans Prize In the midst of an unfolding international crisis, renowned journalist Deborah Campbell finds herself swept up in the mysterious disappearance of Ahlam, her guide and friend. Campbell’s frank, personal account of a journey through fear and the triumph of friendship and courage is as riveting as it is illuminating. The story begins in 2007, when Deborah Campbell travels undercover to Damascus to report on the exodus of Iraqis into Syria, following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. There she meets and hires Ahlam, a refugee working as a “fixer”—providing Western media with trustworthy information and contacts to help get the news out. Ahlam has fled her home in Iraq after being kidnapped while running a humanitarian center. She supports her husband and two children while working to set up a makeshift school for displaced girls. Strong and charismatic, she has become an unofficial leader of the refugee community. Campbell is inspired by Ahlam’s determination to create something good amid so much suffering, and the two women become close friends. But one morning, Ahlam is seized from her home in front of Campbell’s eyes. Haunted by the prospect that their work together has led to her friend’s arrest, Campbell spends the months that follow desperately trying to find Ahlam—all the while fearing she could be next. The compelling story of two women caught up in the shadowy politics behind today’s most searing conflict, A Disappearance in Damascus reminds us of the courage of those who risk their lives to bring us the world’s news.
Download or read book Damascus written by Brigid Keenan and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Damascus, reputed to be the worldʹs oldest continually inhabited city, has enjoyed a history of immense grandeur, enormous political and mercantile power, and great cultural and artistic achievement. In addition to some of Islamʹs most magnificent architecture, such as the Umayyad Mosque, the city boasts a heritage of fairy-tale palaces and sumptuous private houses. Sadly, many of them are in urgent need of restoration. Brigid Keenan and Tim Beddow were given unprecedented access to the inner, "hidden" city, which has resulted in a book that is of immense importance to all concerned with the heritage of architecture in the Islamic world. The superb photographs include façades, courtyards, alleyways and fountains, and the breathtaking interiors that often lie behind the unassuming walls of the old town, with exquisite details in stone, wood, paint, marble, plaster, glass and mother-of-pearl. The whole, published with the generous support of Wafic Rida Said, forms a convincing and elegiac plea for the preservation of the heart of this historic ancient capital. -- Jacket.
Download or read book Damascus Station A Novel written by David McCloskey and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2022 ITW Thriller Award for Best First Novel "Damascus Station is simply marvelous storytelling.…[A] stand-out thriller and essential reading for fans of the genre." —Financial Times A CIA officer and his recruit arrive in war-ravaged Damascus to hunt for a killer in this page-turner that offers the "most authentic depiction of modern-day tradecraft in print." (Navy SEAL sniper and New York Times bestselling author Jack Carr). CIA case officer Sam Joseph is dispatched to Paris to recruit Syrian Palace official Mariam Haddad. The two fall into a forbidden relationship, which supercharges Haddad’s recruitment and creates unspeakable danger when they enter Damascus to find the man responsible for the disappearance of an American spy. But the cat and mouse chase for the killer soon leads to a trail of high-profile assassinations and the discovery of a dark secret at the heart of the Syrian regime, bringing the pair under the all-seeing eyes of Assad’s spy catcher, Ali Hassan, and his brother Rustum, the head of the feared Republican Guard. Set against the backdrop of a Syria pulsing with fear and rebellion, Damascus Station is a gripping thriller that offers a textured portrayal of espionage, love, loyalty, and betrayal in one of the most difficult CIA assignments on the planet.
Download or read book Damascus Street written by Cathy Sultan and published by Calumet Editions. This book was released on 2018-05-18 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DAMASCUS STREET tugs the reader inside the dangerous world of the Levant during the 2006 war between Hisbollah and the Israeli defense force, and ends just before the start of the long and bloody international challenge to the dictatorship of Bashar Al-Assad. The story, begun in Cathy Sultan's first thriller THE SYRIAN, continues with the kidnapping of Nadia Khoury, a beautiful UN official, and the near fatal beating of her American fiancée, Dr. Andrew Sullivan. The couple, so cruelly separated, discover new passions and strengths, ones not always to their liking, in their attempts to survive. The twisting and turning of expectations and consequences brilliantly mirrors the microcosmic and macrocosmic nature of the region, showing through fiction what the author, a well-known Middle East expert, knows deep in her soul-that there can be no innocence in this ancient place.
Download or read book Damascus after the Muslim Conquest written by Nancy Khalek and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-09 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before it fell to Muslim armies in AD 635-6 Damascus had a long and prestigious history as a center of Christianity. How did this city, which became the capitol of the Islamic Empire and its people, negotiate the transition from a late antique or early Byzantine world to an Islamic culture? In Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, Nancy Khalek demonstrates that the changes that took place in Syria during this formative period of Islamic life were not simply a matter of the replacement of one civilization by another as a result of military conquest, but rather of shifting relationships and practices in a multifaceted social and cultural setting. Even as late antique forms of religion and culture persisted, the formation of Islamic identity was affected by the people who constructed, lived in, and narrated the history of their city. Khalek draws on the evidence of architecture and the testimony of pilgrims, biographers, geographers, and historians to shed light on this process of identity formation. Offering a fresh approach to the early Islamic period, she moves the study of Islamic origins beyond a focus on issues of authenticity and textual criticism, and initiates an interdisciplinary discourse on narrative, storytelling, and the interpretations of material culture.
Download or read book The Making Of Modern Lebanon written by Helena Cobban and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a vivid and readable account of Lebanon's development since its first emergence in 1585, unravelling the intricacies of the sectarian/religious groups and the special kinds of communities which have sunk 900-year-old roots in the remote fastnesses of the Mount Lebanon interior.
Download or read book The Home That Was Our Country written by Alia Malek and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the Arab Spring's hopeful start, Alia Malek returned to Damascus to reclaim her grandmother's apartment, which had been lost to her family since Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970. Its loss was central to her parent's decision to make their lives in America. In chronicling the people who lived in the Tahaan building, past and present, Alia portrays the Syrians-the Muslims, Christians, Jews, Armenians, and Kurds-who worked, loved, and suffered in close quarters, mirroring the political shifts in their country. Restoring her family's home as the country comes apart, she learns how to speak the coded language of oppression that exists in a dictatorship, while privately confronting her own fears about Syria's future. The Home That Was Our Country is a deeply researched, personal journey that shines a delicate but piercing light on Syrian history, society, and politics. Teeming with insights, the narrative weaves acute political analysis with a century of intimate family history, ultimately delivering an unforgettable portrait of the Syria that is being erased.
Download or read book Syria s Secret Library written by Mike Thomson and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable story of a small, makeshift library in the town of Daraya, and the people who found hope and humanity in its books during a four-year siege. Daraya lies on the fringe of Damascus, just southwest of the Syrian capital. Yet for four years it lived in another world. Besieged by government forces early in the Syrian Civil War, its people were deprived of food, bombarded by heavy artillery, and under the constant fire of snipers. But deep beneath this scene of frightening devastation lay a hidden library. While the streets above echoed with shelling and rifle fire, the secret world below was a haven of books. Long rows of well-thumbed volumes lined almost every wall: bloated editions with grand leather covers, pocket-sized guides to Syrian poetry, and no-nonsense reference books, all arranged in well-ordered lines. But this precious horde was not bought from publishers or loaned by other libraries--they were the books salvaged and scavenged at great personal risk from the doomed city above. The story of this extraordinary place and the people who found purpose and refuge in it is one of hope, human resilience, and above all, the timeless, universal love of literature and the compassion and wisdom it fosters.
Download or read book Assad or We Burn the Country written by Sam Dagher and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist specializing in the Middle East, this groundbreaking account of the Syrian Civil War reveals the never-before-published true story of a 21st-century humanitarian disaster. In spring 2011, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad turned to his friend and army commander, Manaf Tlass, for advice about how to respond to Arab Spring-inspired protests. Tlass pushed for conciliation but Assad decided to crush the uprising -- an act which would catapult the country into an eight-year long war, killing almost half a million and fueling terrorism and a global refugee crisis. Assad or We Burn the Country examines Syria's tragedy through the generational saga of the Assad and Tlass families, once deeply intertwined and now estranged in Bashar's bloody quest to preserve his father's inheritance. By drawing on his own reporting experience in Damascus and exclusive interviews with Tlass, Dagher takes readers within palace walls to reveal the family behind the destruction of a country and the chaos of an entire region. Dagher shows how one of the world's most vicious police states came to be and explains how a regional conflict extended globally, engulfing the Middle East and pitting the United States and Russia against one another. Timely, propulsive, and expertly reported, Assad or We Burn the Country is the definitive account of this global crisis, going far beyond the news story that has dominated headlines for years.
Download or read book The Sword of Damascus Death of Rome Saga Book Four written by Richard Blake and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-06-09 with total page 661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fourth book of the DEATH OF ROME SAGA is a must-read for those who loved the heroism of Gladiator and Spartacus. 687 AD. Expansive and triumphant, the Caliphate has stripped Egypt and Syria from the Byzantine Empire. Farther and farther back, the formerly hegemonic Empire has been pushed - once to the very walls of its capital, Constantinople. But what is all this to old Aelric, now in his nineties, and a refugee from the Empire he's spent his life holding together? No longer the Lord Senator Alaric, Brother Aelric is writing his memoirs in the remote wastes of northern England, and waiting patiently for death. Then a band of northern barbarians turn up outside the monastery - and then another. Before he can draw another breath, Aelric is a prisoner of unknown forces, and headed straight back into the snake pit of Mediterranean hatreds. What awaits him at the end of his long and dangerous journey is a confrontation that decides the fate of all mankind.
Download or read book Sarmada written by Fadi Azzam and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarmada, Arabic for “perpetuate” or “the eternally-not-changed,” is the novel’s fictitious setting. In the title, Fadi Azzam creates a new word (a derivative female form of noun-verb, which does not exist in Arabic) and in so doing immediately lets the reader know that women are the protagonists of this story that spans several generations, from Syria to Paris and back again. The novel is set in the Druze area and is a declaration of love for tolerance and for the peaceful coexistence of the many religious groups that live in close proximity. Myths, communists, nationalists, murder, illicit love, superstition, erotic trees and women’s breasts make up the tapestry of this strange, beautifully writen, first novel. Fadi Azzam narrates, just as he writes poetry: Sarmada is direct, ruthless and full of fire.
Download or read book Syria and the Neutrality Trap written by Carsten Wieland and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Syrian war has been an example of the abuse and insufficient delivery of humanitarian assistance. According to international practice, humanitarian aid should be channelled through a state government that bears a particular responsibility for its population. Yet in Syria, the bulk of relief went through Damascus while the regime caused the vast majority of civilian deaths. Should the UN have severed its cooperation with the government and neglected its humanitarian duty to help all people in need? Decision-makers face these tough policy dilemmas, and often the “neutrality trap” snaps shut. This book discusses the political and moral considerations of how to respond to a brutal and complex crisis while adhering to international law and practice. The author, a scholar and senior diplomat involved in the UN peace talks in Geneva, draws from first-hand diplomatic, practitioner and UN sources. He sheds light on the UN's credibility crisis and the wider implications for the development of international humanitarian and human rights law. This includes covering the key questions asked by Western diplomats, NGOs and international organizations, such as: Why did the UN not confront the Syrian government more boldly? Was it not only legally correct but also morally justifiable to deliver humanitarian aid to regime areas where rockets were launched and warplanes started? Why was it so difficult to render cross-border aid possible where it was badly needed? The meticulous account of current international practice is both insightful and disturbing. It tackles the painful lessons learnt and provides recommendations for future challenges where politics fails and humanitarians fill the moral void.
Download or read book Damascus written by Gérard Degeorge and published by Flammarion-Pere Castor. This book was released on 2004 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With over 300 original photographs, as well as charts, architectural plans, and reproductions of engravings and ancient watercolors, Damascus provides a rich and thorough introduction to the architectural and archeological history of one of the world's great cities. Weaving together aspects of history, sociology, religion, and law, Degeorge presents a unique perspective on the sights and monuments, allowing the reader a global view and a tangible sense of the successive civilizations in order to understand their mysteries. In the introduction, the natural history and geography of the region are explored elements crucial for a deeper understanding of Damascus's place on the world map and its situation on the major commercial routes. Relations with the West (the Greek and Roman empires, the Crusades, and French Imperialism) are broadly addressed, both in the acts and deeds of the people, as well as the perspective of Western travelers, businessmen, and political figures. Degeorge also includes the impressions and observations of nearby residents of the Mahgreb, Syria, and other members of the Orient, departing from the uniquely ethnocentric point of view that often dominates studies of the region."
Download or read book Dancing in Damascus written by miriam cooke and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On March 17, 2011, many Syrians rose up against the authoritarian Asad regime that had ruled them with an iron fist for forty years. Initial successes were quickly quashed, and the revolution seemed to devolve into a civil war pitting the government against its citizens and extremist mercenaries. As of late 2015, almost 300,000 Syrians have been killed and over half of a total population of 23 million forced out of their homes. Nine million are internally displaced and over four million are wandering the world, many on foot or in leaky boats. Countless numbers have been disappeared. These shocking statistics and the unstoppable violence notwithstanding, the revolution goes on. The story of the attempted crushing of the revolution is known. Less well covered has been the role of artists and intellectuals in representing to the world and to their people the resilience of revolutionary resistance and defiance. How is it possible that artists, filmmakers and writers have not been cowed into numbed silence but are becoming more and more creative? How can we make sense of their insistence that despite the apocalypse engulfing the country their revolution is ongoing and that their works participate in its persistence? With smartphones, pens, voices and brushes, these artists registered their determination to keep the idea of the revolution alive. Dancing in Damascus traces the first four years of the Syrian revolution and the activists’ creative responses to physical and emotional violence.
Download or read book Our Man in Damascus Elie Cohn written by Eli Ben-Hanan and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
