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Sowing the Wind book cover
Sowing the Wind
The Seeds of Conflict in the Middle East
1980
First Published
3.77
Average Rating
520
Number of Pages

The seeds of conflict in the Middle East were sown in the first sixty years of the twentieth century. It was then that the Western powers - Britain, France and the United States - discovered the imperatives for interventions that have plunged the region into crisis ever since. It was also then that most of the region's modern-day states were created and their regimes forged - their management by the West earned abiding resentment. Sowing the Wind tells of how and why this happened. The subject is painfully and essentially somber, but Scottish historian John Keay illuminates it with lucid analysis and sparkling anecdotes set within a rich and elegant narrative. This is that rarest of works, a history with humor, an epic with attitude, writing that delights. Sowing the Wind examines the critical political underpinnings of conflict in the Middle East. Keay (known for his best-selling history of India) focuses on the hard-core countries of the Middle East known as the fertile crescent: Egypt, Jordan, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Keay’s account is absolutely riveting as he follows the West’s manipulation, management, and mismanagement of the Middle East from 1900 up through the ascent of Arafat to power in the early 1960s. He ends with a forty-page tour-de-force update of the last forty years of American negotiation of economic and political fault lines in the Middle East. Keay’s sweeping history pre-Balfour to post-Sues unearths a host of surprising firsts, from the Gulf’s first “gusher” to the first aerial assaults on Baghdad, the first of Syria’s innumerable coups, and the first terrorist outrages and suicide bombers. Little-known figures - junior officers, contractors, explorers, spies - contest the orthodoxies of Arabist giants like T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Glubb Pasha, and Loy Henderson. The generals - Townshend and Allenby, Gourard and Catroux, Wavell and Spears, Eisenhower and Patton - mingle memorably with maverick travelers and femmes both fatales and formidables. Four Roosevelts juggle with the fates of nations. Authors as alien as E.M. Forster and Arthur Koestler add their testimony. Pertinent, scholarly, and irreverent, Sowing the Wind provides a uniquely ambitious and enthralling insight into the making of the world’s most fraught arena.

Avg Rating
3.77
Number of Ratings
64
5 STARS
25%
4 STARS
38%
3 STARS
28%
2 STARS
8%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads

Author

John Keay
John Keay
Author · 16 books

John Stanley Melville Keay FRGS is an English journalist and author specialising in writing popular histories about India and the Far East, often with a particular focus on their colonisation and exploration by Europeans. John Keay is the author of about 20 books, all factual, mostly historical, and largely to do with Asia, exploration or Scotland. His first book stayed in print for thirty years; many others have become classics. His combination of meticulous research, irreverent wit, powerful narrative and lively prose have invariably been complimented by both reviewers and readers. UK-based and a full-time author since 1973, he also wrote and presented over 100 documentaries for BBC Radios 3 and 4 from 1975-95 and guest-lectured tour groups 1990-2000. He reviews on related subjects, occasionally speaks on them, and travels extensively.

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