Lebanon: A House Divided
by Sandra Mackey
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sandra MackeyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-07-17
ISBN: 0393328430
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Reviews of Lebanon: A House Divided
Book Review: Death of a nation . . .
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a compellingly readable book about an immensely complex subject. As history, it provides a vivid picture of the almost countless competing political and social interests that have brought about the "death" of Lebanon. Existing until 1975 as a kind of mirage on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, Lebanon fell into a years-long civil war played out most dramatically in the international media as heavily armed militia blew apart the city of Beirut and then, later, as one westerner after another was taken hostage by clandestine insurgent groups. Mackey's argument is that Lebanon has never existed in any real way as a nation, its affairs managed by various Christian and Muslim mafia-like families, a precarious arrangement that functioned in the absence of an actual government and for good or ill falling within the spheres of influence of other countries.
The resulting social inequities permitted great wealth to exist side-by-side with conditions of abject poverty, and all may have continued indefinitely except for the mass displacement of Palestinian refugees by a militant Israel after 1948 and the rise of militant Shiism that came with the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. When scattered skirmishes among armed groups exploded into full-scale civil war, the author argues, there was nothing to stop the collapse of all order. Intervention by Israel and Syria, the UN and the US merely confounded the tangled objectives of the combatants, while escalating their brutality and further polarizing those caught without mercy in the crossfire.
Reading this book is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Calamity follows upon calamity with the inevitability of Greek tragedy. While it ends in 1988, when it was first published, the author's account of the rise of Islamist-inspired Hizbollah points directly to events that fill the news 20 years later. This is an excellent primer for readers who want to understand the continual bloodshed in this tiny country - once called the Switzerland of the Middle East. Mackey writes fluidly and coherently, enlivening her historian's distance with a journalist's on-the-ground observations of key moments, public figures, and the miseries and sufferings of unnamed noncombatants. There are extensive notes, a lengthy bibliography, and a helpful index.
Summary of Lebanon: A House Divided
With a new introduction by the author, a seminal study of Lebanon?s past, present, and future.
With the West?s economic and security interests increasingly at stake in the Middle East, it is impossible to ignore Lebanon?a nation in all ways divided and tormented by the interplay between the West and the Arab world. Sandra Mackey delineates the multifarious culture that is Lebanon; carefully stripping away the complex stigmas of Lebanese politics, she brings each component into focus, priming readers on the conflicts between Sunni and Shia, Maronites and Druze, Christian and Muslim, Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Lebanon and Palestine, and Syria and Lebanon.Covering Lebanon?s history through the civil war of 197589, and with a new introduction on recent developments, Mackey lays the groundwork needed to comprehend this often ill-understood country?offering insight into its role as the gateway between West and East, and bringing clarity of focus to the schisms that serve to divide and define Lebanon.
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