Cruelty and Silence by Kanan Makiya
The Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya brought the attention of the world to the brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime in his powerful 1989 bestseller Republic of Fear. Now, writing for the first time under his own name, Makiya confronts the broad realities of tyranny in the Middle East and the moral failure of Arab and pro-Arab intellectuals to repudiate it. Makiya first gives us the stories of Khalil, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa, and Taimour—the Arab and Kurdish heroes of this book. Their testimony, revealing the true extent of occupation, prejudice, revolution, and routinized violence, is a compelling example of the literature of witness. He then links these tales of survival to an examination of the Arab intelligentsia's response to Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War, comparing the flood of condemnation of the West with the trickle of protest over Saddam's mass murder campaign against the Kurds. In his exploration of these "landscapes of cruelty and silence," Kanan Makiya lays out the nationalist mythologies that underlie them. He calls for a new politics in the Arab world—a politics that puts absolute respect for human life above all else.
"Bold and brilliant. . . An indispensable book for anyone interested in the politics of the Middle East." -- Abbas Milani - San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle
"What Emile Zola did for French anti-Semitism and Arthur Koestler did for Soviet totalitarianism, Kanan Makiya now intends to do for Arab nationalism. Sweeping, impassioned, and perturbing." -- Michael Massing - The New Yorker
"What Emile Zola did for French anti-Semitism and Arthur Koestler did for Soviet totalitarianism, Kanan Makiya now intends to do for Arab nationalism. Sweeping, impassioned, and perturbing." -- Michael Massing - The New Yorker
Born in Baghdad, Kanan Makiya is the author of Republic of Fear, Post-Islamic Classicism, The Monument, and Cruelty and Silence, which was awarded the 1993 Lionel Gelber Prize fro the best book on international relations. He has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Independent, The Times (London), and The Times Literary Supplement. A trained architect, he is a founding director of The Iraq Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that facilitates research toward a democratic Iraq. He has collaborated on two films for television, one of which, Saddam's Killing Fields, received the 1992 Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Television Documentary on Foreign Affairs. Makiya currently directs the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard University and teaches at Brandeis University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780393311419 |
| ISBN 10 | 0393311414 |
| Title | Cruelty and Silence |
| Author | Kanan Makiya |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | WW Norton & Co |
| Year published | 1994-06-30 |
| Number of pages | 368 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |