In his memoir, Our Last Best Chance, King Abdullah II of Jordan tells a story that is at once personal and political. His powerful message on the centrality of the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to future peace and stability provides an intimate look at the contested and conflict-ridden history of the modern Middle East. After generations of gridlock, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may seem to have become an unstable and wholly inadequate status quo. There may be few, if any, more chances for peace.
The fact that Gorbachev is associated with the dissolution of the Soviet Union has made him a much admired man in the West, a near hero. His role is the reunification of Germany and the ‘liberation’ from Soviet overlordship of the remainder of Eastern Europe earned him a Nobel Peace prize in 1990. However in the much diminished successor state of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, Gorbachev is seen in a very different light. Thus a chasm exists in the perception of Gorbachev as a person and as a politician between Russia and the West.
I don’t usually weigh my books, but I must say that at 3.5 pounds and 957 pages, Bill Clinton’s My Life is quite hefty. Beyond his marked candor, this former President unearths with each sentence an incredible amount of detail—so much that while reading I couldn’t help but wonder whether I would be capable of half as much.
Sherbaz Mazari’s journey to disillusionment begins as early as 1948, after the creation of Pakistan. Hopes were running high and he was eager to serve his country when he took a group of tribesmen to fight for the liberation of Kashmir. Hearing stories of the Maharajah’s unlawful treaty granting the state to India and the oppression of Kashmiri Muslims, he gathered volunteers from the Mazari tribe and rode on horseback to the border of Kashmir to join the rebels.
I straddled a historical boundary sitting between my father and my grandmother as I pulled back the first page of Iranian activist-lawyer Shirin Ebadi’s autobiography. I bridged mother and son, linking the experiences of a once-17-year old man who fled and of a woman who stayed and endured the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Ebadi, the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, makes a parallel connection with her memoir “Iran Awakening."
