New Titles
Troubled Triangle: The United States, Turkey, and Israel in the New Middle East
by William B. Quandt, Editor
Publication date: November 7, 2011
Since early 2009, it has seemed that the once-warm relations between Turkey and Israel have reached crisis point. To complicate matters further, both countries are close partners of the United States. In this timely title, a group of leading scholar-practitioners from all three countries jointly explore this crisis.
The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine
by Miko Peled
Publication date: June 15, 2012
We are now taking advance orders for this book at our new, secure webstore. This offer will last through February 14. Those who place advance orders will receive their copies of the book some three months before the scheduled mid-June publication date.In 1997, a tragedy struck the family of Israeli-American Miko Peled: His beloved niece Smadar was killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem. That tragedy propelled Peled onto a journey of discovery. It pushed him to re-examine many of the beliefs he had grown up with, as the son and grandson of leading figures in Israel's political-military elite, and transformed him into a courageous and visionary activist in the struggle for human rights and a hopeful, lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
The Tragedy of Lebanon: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers, and American Bunglers
by Jonathan Randal
Publication date: July 16, 2012
The Tragedy of Lebanon is a reissue of Jonathan Randal's widely acclaimed 1983 study of the rightwing Christian militias in Lebanon that in 1975 launched a bloody bid for power that plunged the country into a decades-long cycle of war and civil conflict. For this 2012 reissue, Randal has added a piercing new Preface that reflects on the meaning of those events, both then and today. We have also used the same main title used in the British version of the book, rather than the main title in the original U.S. version, "Going All the Way"-- a title that, as Randal reveals in the new Preface, was suggested to him in a Beirut bar by none other than John le Carré.
Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between
by Laila El-Haddad
Publication date: November 15, 2010
With Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between, El-Haddad takes us into the life and world of a busy Palestinian journalist who is both covering the story of Gaza and living it—very intensely. This book is El-Haddad’s self-curated choice of the best of her writings from December 2004 through July 2010. She was in Gaza City in 2005, watching hopefully as the Israelis prepared their withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. She covered the January 2006 Palestinian elections—judged ‘free and fair’ by all international monitors. But then, she watched aghast as the Israeli government, backed by the Bush administration, moved in to punish Gaza’s 1.5 million people for the way they had voted by throwing a tough siege around the Strip.
Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring
by Rami Zurayk
Publication date: June 14, 2011
The wave of anti-government protests that swept through the Arab world from December 2010 on is transforming politics and society in the Middle East. The protests came as a surprise to many observers-- but not to Rami Zurayk, an experienced Lebanese agronomist and social activist who had been charting the collapse of traditional agricultural livelihoods in the Middle East since the late 1980s.
News and Updates
2012
Jon Randal's 'Tragedy of Lebanon': A timely re-issue amid regional turmoil
Amid daily reports that now link the rising violence in Syria with networks and groups in Lebanon, Just World Books is delighted to be publishing a timely re-issue of Jon Randal's acclaimed 1983 study of the rise and activities of the extreme rightwing Christian in Lebanon. The new volume is titled The Tragedy of Lebanon: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers, and American Bunglers. (The earlier edition was published in the United States under the slightly unfortunate title "Going All the Way"-- a moniker that, Randal now tells us in the thoughtful, all-new Preface to the current volume, was first suggested to him by John Le Carré.) Randal's poignant and still fresh recounting of the devastation wrought during the Lebanese Civil War is now available online for purchase in advance of publication, with free shipping offered until February 29.
2012
Come visit our new webstore!
We are pleased to announce that the new Just World Books webstore is open for business, and more titles will be put on its shelves every week for the next few weeks! The store and the print-&-distribute system that backs it up now allow us to ship books easily and inexpensively to residents of the U.K. and Australia, as well as the United States! Not to worry if you live elsewhere, because we can still easily ship all over the world from one of our three printing hubs, though with some additional shipping costs (Contact us for details).
2012
Chas Freeman warns of increased risk of U.S.-Iran confrontation during 2012
In his latest podcast interview for Just World Books, Amb. Chas W. Freeman, Jr. warned that, especially during the current election year in the United States, there is a real risk that the United States might get dragged into a major confrontation with Iran. He said there is little prospect of any American activism in Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking-- and that U.S. influence in the region is anyway declining. He also gave a thoughtful analysis of the effects of the Arab Spring, one year after the momentous events of Tunisia and Egypt. Amb. Freeman's book America's Misadventures in the Middle East is newly available to readers in Australia and the United Kingdom, in addition to the United States. Click to buy it-- in hardcover or paperback-- at the "Buy" button here. You can listen to the whole of today's podcast here.
2012
Alice Walker praises Peled's "The General's Son"
Alice Walker, whose complex and beautiful novel The Color Purple earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, has contributed a fabulous Foreword to Miko Peled's upcoming book The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine. In recent years, Ms. Walker has taken several courageous and risky stands in favor of Palestinian, as well as Israeli, rights. In the Foreword to Peled's book she writes, "There are few books on the Palestine/Israel issue that seem as hopeful to me as this one... " (You can read a longer excerpt, below.) Readers from the U.K., Australia, and the U.S. who are eager to see The General's Son can place their advance orders for it at our new, secure webstore.
Featured Author: Rami Zurayk
Rami Zurayk, author of Food, Farming and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring, is an agronomy professor at the American University of Beirut and a longtime activist for political and social justice. Born in Beirut during the 1958 U.S. Marines’ landing in Lebanon, he has witnessed two Israeli-Arab wars, one protracted civil war, one major Israeli invasion, one Israeli retreat and one Israeli defeat. He studied at AUB and at Oxford University. He has published over a hundred articles, monographs and technical reports on agriculture, food, environment and education.
Zurayk's current research focuses on the relationship between landscapes and livelihoods, on food politics, and on local food systems. He works closely with Lebanese civil society of which he is also a firm critic. He is the co-founder of the Association for Lebanese Organic Agriculture and of Slow Food Beirut. He initiated Healthy Basket, Lebanon’s first and on-going community supported agriculture program in 2001. After the July 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon, he created a post-war development program, Land and People, to aid in livelihood recovery.
His three most recent books are: From `Akkar to `Amel, Lebanon’s Slow Food Trail(co-authored with Sami Abdul Rahman, 2008), Plants and People: Ethnobotanical Knowledge from Lebanon (co-authored with Salma Talhouk, 2010) and Tales from the Badia, an English translation of Bedouin folk tales compiled by Hamra Abu Eid (2010). He writes a weekly column in Al Akhbar, the main leftist opposition newspaper in Lebanon where he also edits a weekly page on food politics. He blogs at "Land and People" and tweets at @ramizurayk.
Zurayk is currently professor of Ecosystem Management in the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences at the American University of Beirut, and says he hasn’t fully recovered from his first job, held over 20 years ago, as the country representative of a Northern NGO in Yemen.
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