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This book attempts to discuss the American government's involvement in the Middle East since 1776. With such a broad subject, of course it's going to be a bit shallow. While I commend the author on his effort, I found it to be disorganized at times, a bit overly simplistic at others, and downright confusing at still other times.
Oren jumps around in the timeline, introducing historical figures decades before he plans to discuss them, often hinting at decades to come before returning to the current discussion without warning the reader that he'd returned to his original discussion. The entire first half of the book, I was frustrated by the apparent vacuum in which Americans operated; he made little or no mention of what the great European powers were up to. I understand that it's a book about America's Middle Eastern involvement, but we weren't operating in a vacuum and there were, in fact, more powerful players at the time. I've taken just enough Middle Eastern history classes to get annoyed by Oren's silence in certain areas. And his statement that our treatment by Barbary pirates resulted in the Constitution, while partly true, ignores numerous domestic as well as other foreign issues that all joined together in creating the necessity of a stronger union.
The book could have used a little bit stronger editing: in one chapter, Oren spends a page and a half talking about the Americans who'd travelled to the Middle East, witnessed slavery there, and wrote about the comparisons between American slavery and Middle Eastern slavery. A page later, he writes that the people least likely to compare the two were Americans who'd actually journeyed there. Huh? Not so much a topic issue but still editing: the use of commas was often rather...quirky.
Still, he did introduce a couple of topics I'd like to learn more about - primarily, the Laconia incident that he says directly resulted in America's entry into WWI. I've always believed it was the Lusitania, but that doesn't even get mentioned in this book. It's worth reading for further research topics, but I don't know if I'd recommend it to someone who hasn't read other books on the Middle East; this one is just a little too one-dimensional.
Oren jumps around in the timeline, introducing historical figures decades before he plans to discuss them, often hinting at decades to come before returning to the current discussion without warning the reader that he'd returned to his original discussion. The entire first half of the book, I was frustrated by the apparent vacuum in which Americans operated; he made little or no mention of what the great European powers were up to. I understand that it's a book about America's Middle Eastern involvement, but we weren't operating in a vacuum and there were, in fact, more powerful players at the time. I've taken just enough Middle Eastern history classes to get annoyed by Oren's silence in certain areas. And his statement that our treatment by Barbary pirates resulted in the Constitution, while partly true, ignores numerous domestic as well as other foreign issues that all joined together in creating the necessity of a stronger union.
The book could have used a little bit stronger editing: in one chapter, Oren spends a page and a half talking about the Americans who'd travelled to the Middle East, witnessed slavery there, and wrote about the comparisons between American slavery and Middle Eastern slavery. A page later, he writes that the people least likely to compare the two were Americans who'd actually journeyed there. Huh? Not so much a topic issue but still editing: the use of commas was often rather...quirky.
Still, he did introduce a couple of topics I'd like to learn more about - primarily, the Laconia incident that he says directly resulted in America's entry into WWI. I've always believed it was the Lusitania, but that doesn't even get mentioned in this book. It's worth reading for further research topics, but I don't know if I'd recommend it to someone who hasn't read other books on the Middle East; this one is just a little too one-dimensional.
