The Best Books on the Middle East
Experts Recommend Top Titles to Understand Mideast Conflict

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April 18, 2002 -- Host Neal Conan joins bookseller Shannon Biggler, poet Ibtisam Barakat, and authors David Lesch and Adina Hoffman in discussing the most useful resources for understanding the crisis in the Middle East. Following is a list of their recommendations.

• Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, by David Shipler (Penguin, 1987).

• From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas Friedman (Anchor, 1990).

• A History of Israel From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, by Howard Sachar (Oxford University Press, 1996).

• A History of the Arab Peoples, by Albert Hourani (Warner Books, 1992).

• House of Windows, by Adina Hoffman (Broadway Books, 2002).

• In the Land of Israel, by Amos Oz (Harcourt Brace, 1993).

• The Iron Wall, by Avi Shalim (W. W. Norton & Co., 2001).

• Journey to Jerusalem, by Grace Halsell (MacMillan, 1981).

• The Middle East, by Bernard Lewis (Touchstone Books, 1997).

• Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story, by Taha Muhammad Ali (Ibis Editions, 2000).

• Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Charles Smith (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001).

• A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin (Owl Books, 2001).

• Power Politics, by Arundhati Roy (South End Press, 2002).

• Righteous Victims, by Benny Morris (Knopf, 2001).

• A Short History of the Jewish People from Legendary Times to Modern Statehood, by Raymond P. Scheindlin (Hungry Minds, 2000).

• Stations of Desire: Love Elegies from Ibn Arabi and New Poems, by Michael Sells (Ibis Editions, 2000).

• Unholy Wars, by John Cooley (Stylus Publishing, 2000).

• Wild Thorns, by Sahar Khalifeh (Interlink Publishing Group, 1999).

• The Yellow Wind, by David Grossman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998).

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