The Middle East and the West.
Harper Torchbooks, 1966. Trade paperback. (No ISBN stated) Fair reading copy, pages soiled, stray underlining, price penciled on top of first end page, securly bound, all pages complete, fair wrappers, soiled, three tiny circles punched in outer bottom corner of front wrapper. "This is certainly the best short book on the Middle East known to this reviewer. It is a work of the highest level, combining elegance of style with an easy mastery of the subject. This is probably one of the best books on any historical-political subject in recent years... Professor Lewis defines the Middle East as a historical, geographical, and cultural entity, shows what the West meant (and still means) to Middle Easterners, and traces the main political and intellectual movements in recent times." — Walter Laqueur, "The New York Review of Books." "Lucid, concise, unencumbered with unnecessary detail, of a bare and authoritative simplicity, the fruit of great learning perfectly digested [this book] deserves to be widely read. The name 'Middle East' by which the heartlands of Islam are now universally known, is, as Professor Lewis points out, western-centered, a product of western military thinking for whom the area was — during the brief period of western dominance — a base, a crossroads, a center of communications to be won and secured in the course of the struggle for supremacy which European great powers waged so long and so ruinously .... The alien West has alienated the Middle East from itself. —" Elie Kedourie. History.