Occidentalism

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Coleman Young and Lonnie Wheeler

In his sophisticated, savvy, charismatic, fifty-year career, Mayor Coleman Young has been called many things, and one of them is the most powerful black politician in American history. His account of his epic journey from "Big Time Red" on the Prohibition streets of Detroit to five terms as the city's mayor looks back on decades of activity paralleling every modern African-American movement. Young's family moved from Alabama to Detroit's Black Bottom in the early twenties. He was an officer in a barely integrated army, a member of the Tuskegee Airmen who called for Eleanor Roosevelt's support when he and fellow black officers were suffering under army Jim Crow laws. He was a labor activist intimately involved in the alliance of white and black workers in the union movement of the thirties and forties. And he was an urban leader who struggled to bring solvency and self-respect to Motor City. His life abounds in colorful anecdote and abrasive repartee. When he was harassed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, his response was: "I consider the activities of this Committee as un-American. . This radical visionary and his metropolis are a metaphor for our society. His family history is the territory of Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land. His eloquence and political passion recall The Autobiography of Malcolm X. His blueprint for the future of urban America is his own, and the problems he has confronted - crime, police harassment, white flight, unemployment - are ours.

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Richard Engel

Richard Engel graduated from Stanford University in 1996. He wanted to be a foreign correspondent and knew that the Middle East would continue to be a hot spot for breaking news, so he moved into a poor Cairo neighborhood and learned “street” Arabic by talking to his neighbors. After a few years reporting for the BBC and other news outlets, he moved to Jerusalem to gain perspective on the other side of the Middle Eastern conflict. By the end of the Gulf War II, he was NBC’s main on-air war correspondent and one of the few American journalists who filed reports from Baghdad for the duration of the war. In A FIST IN THE HORNET’S NEST, Richard Engel examines the anticipation, impact and aftermath of the war from the insider perspective of the Iraqi people who are still living through it. The stories are wide-ranging and gripping: a Christian Iraqi pharmacist whose biggest fear before the war is what Muslim fundamentalists might do to him; a pastry shop owner who is one of several hundred Iraqis who starts a newspaper in his basement after the war; a history professor -- tortured under Saddam’s regime for starting a movie club in his home -- who, after the war, begins building a headquarters for the new political party he founds. Through a chronological journey that begins well before the first American troops arrive, Engel recounts all of these stories with a sense of immediacy that comes from living and interacting with the people. He also provides a critical assessment of the American war strategy and the future of the Gulf Region.

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Olayiwola Abegunrin

In this twenty-first century, Africa has become an important source of the United States energy imports and the world's natural resources. It has also become the epicenter of the worlds deadly health epidemic, HIV/AIDS, and one of the battlegrounds in the fight against terrorism. With Nigeria and South Africa leading the continent, Africa has become a major player to be reckoned with in the global affairs.-- PUBLISHER DESCRIPTION.

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Olivier Roy

In this book, Olivier Roy, Europe's leading scholar of political Islam, argues that the consequences of the "war on terror" have artificially conflated conflicts in the Middle East in such a way that they appear to be the expression of a widespread "Muslim anger" against the West. But in reality, there are no us and them. Instead, the West faces an array of "reverse alliances" that operate according to their own logic and dynamics. The West supports General Musharraf in Pakistan, yet his military intelligence services are in league with the Taliban; in Iraq, the United States shores up a government that is closely linked to its archenemy, Iran; Iraqi Kurds, allies of the Americans, give sanctuary to the PKK, an adversary of a fellow NATO member, Turkey; while the Saudis support the Iraqi Sunnis who are, in turn, fighting Coalition forces. As if these issues were not complicated enough, the ever-worsening Shia-Sunni divide now threatens to disrupt any future strategic planning the West might attempt in the Middle East. Roy unravels the complexity of these conflicts in order to better understand the political discontent that sustains them. He also emphasizes that the war on terror should not be regarded merely as a geopolitical blunder committed by a fringe group of neoconservatives. It is instead a problematic outgrowth of our deeply rooted Western perceptions of the Middle East, including the belief that Islam, rather than politics, is the overarching factor in these conflicts, thus explaining the West's support for either would-be secular democrats or (more or less) benign dictators. Roy's conclusion argues that the West has no alternative but to engage in a dialogue with the political forces that truly matter—namely the Islamo-nationalists of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.