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For those who care(?) I ought to note that book reviews may be wanting for the next several weeks. I’ve committed to a pretty dense schedule of work, which is certainly not my ideal way to spend the remainder of the summer, but I’d prefer to do a lot of work for this one client in particular now rather than next winter since the long drive to their office is at least safe, now. Anyway. I can share a number of notes on one book:

Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East
Karl E. Meyer & Shareen Blair Brysac

So, full disclosure, I skipped about 100 of this book’s 420 pages, and then read the conclusion, but I’m calling it close enough. Mostly because chugging through the 300-some pages I did read was punishment enough that I feel I’ve earned it.

Which is not to say that this is a bad book. I think the book was a good idea, badly handled. The title sort of illustrates the problem, as “the invention of the modern Middle East” implies a historical narrative, while “Kingmakers” implies a series of biographical portraits. The book ends up trying to do both and the outcome is a muddle.

I imagine that the book nonetheless works for many people; I however was not among them. A story of the shaping of the Middle East over a century or so would be interesting to me, but in Kingmakers the thread of that story was chopped up and maddeningly difficult to follow. One of the biggest problems was, probably, that many of the figures profiled were contemporaries whose kingmaking activities overlapped, and as a result the same events were repeatedly half-told two or three or four times, rather than told well, and clearly, once.

Another problem is that the biographies largely failed because they were also choppy but, moreover, just weren’t interesting. Lawrence of Arabia I’ve heard of, and I knew the name Sykes, but most of the other kingmakers were not individuals I had a personal interest in. This can be overcome if one first clearly introduces why a person should be interesting, after which even relatively pedestrian details of that person’s life can become interesting because they are about that interesting person rather than the schmoe down the street. But Kingmakers didn’t pull off this trick.

Which is a pity, not only because of how I was disappointed with a book I’ve had on my list for some time, but because there is good and important information and analysis in this book. I will admit that, as a citizen of one of the imperialist nations whose misdeeds figure prominently in Middle Eastern history, Kingmakers is strong drink. Reactionaries might never imagine it, but even a liberal American like myself gets little joy out of recitation of our government’s fucking over of people and nations. It’s still demoralizing even if you believe it’s accurate.

And I was familiar with much of this, already; fact is I don’t think I was really put off this book because it said bad things about America so much as by the awkward and clumsy way in which it said them. The first half of the book is largely about British meddling, and I found most of that at least as painful in spite of having a perverse ability, I will confess, to read about British imperialist aggression with a sort of cheery, sports contest perspective. Didn’t help, here; Kingmakers was just a tiresome slog regardless of whose country was doing the kingmaking.

Still, as I say, there is informative and intelligent content to be found in here. The epilogue to the book was a stirring, if too-late, redemption of the clumsy main chapters. I would like to quote a couple of passages.

First, empires’ frequent attempts to use fanatical sects of one sort or another for their own ends is critiqued, thus (also perhaps offering another, different relevance for contemporary American politics as well):

Politicians by their nature tend reflexively to dissimulate. They may well also assume that priests, preachers, imams, rabbis, and monks mean only half of what they say. Nor do the hard-headed normally take seriously the secular equivalent of messianic religious faiths such as Communism and Nazism. (Herr Hitler could not really mean what he declared… once in office, he will behave more responsibly.)

Also:

Taking hostile ideologies seriously does not preclude seeking the sources of their popular appeal. […] If you were an Iranian, what would you make of the United States? Yes, it is outwardly a free country, and Americans do elect their leaders. But who elects the spy agencies, the Pentagon, the multinational corporations, the masters of the media, the think tanks, and lobbies that—in the eyes of many Iranians—form an interlocking and impenetrable mosaic?

Kingmakers, indeed.