100 books like The Prince of the Marshes

This is my favorite book for showing how culture affects perceptions of history. Ansari writes brilliantly of the time between the Prophet Muhammad and the fall of the Ottoman Empire and beyond. My favorite quote about differences between Western and Eastern cultures, says it all: “What looks from one side like a campaign to secure greater rights for citizens…looks from the other side like powerful strangers inserting themselves into the private affairs of families and undercutting people’s ability to maintain their communal selves as families and tribal networks. In short what looks from one side like empowering each individual, looks from the other side like disempowering whole communities” (p.353). The book is full of similar cultural insights and is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the Middle East. 

In 1979 Caton traveled to a remote area of Yemen to do fieldwork on the oral poetry of local tribes. He describes how tribesmen used poetry in multiple facets of their lives, to praise friends and scorn enemies, at important events and in mediating local conflicts. Although he works to develop trust with his neighbors, he is never quite sure of the cultural rules, and soon finds himself involved in a local controversy that leads to his betrayal and ultimately abduction and imprisonment. Many of the traditions Caton describes are lost or abbreviated now, but knowing about them helps us understand the subtleties that drive Yemen’s modern conflicts. 

In Tents and Pyramids, Khuri describes how Arabs’ ways of seeing and dealing with reality have implications for power in the Middle East. He juxtaposes tents—the low horizontal Bedouin ones—against vertical hierarchical pyramids. Khuri argues that authority is not built into the tent approach—rather the strategy is to act as equal groups with leaders who are only “first among equals” and isolated individuals are the vulnerable ones. The second group, imagined as hierarchical pyramids, has no standardized rules for succession and ends up being the ones who conquer the rest. To stay in power these autocrats need strong militaries to keep the public from holding them accountable. Although Khuri’s framework doesn’t always hold up, it offers a useful way of imaging the region’s power structures.    

This book describes the rich multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-lingual communities that co-existed peacefully in Alexandria and Cairo in the 1940s and early 1950s. They forged close ties in such public domains as commerce and schooling, while keeping their family and religious lives mainly private and marrying within the community. By the mid-50s as Arab-Israeli problems spread to Egypt, the Nasser government stoked animosity against the Jews and other non-Muslim communities, forcing many to migrate. The book shows graphically how even during normal times cultural communities distinguish between areas where it is safe to mingle with outsiders and those where it is better to draw tight boundaries against penetration if they are to sustain their uniqueness. The latter are mostly areas that define them, including religion, values, and bloodlines.

If you want a quick overview of Iraqi history with easily digestible political science takes on the country’s problems, this is your book. Tripp’s study of Iraq has been read by countless undergraduate students—myself included—grappling with trying to understand the course of events that led the United States to declare war on Iraq twice. The book provides lucid arguments in an easily accessible writing style. As a first introduction to Iraqi history, this book is hard to beat.

Kanan is an Iraqi exile who was very supportive of the US invasion of Iraq. In The Rope, he provides a fictional account of what happened in the country, placing responsibility for the rise of sectarianism and the descent into civil war at the feet of Iraqi Shia leaders. It’s a brave and honest book. 

This compelling history of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division’s armored spearhead into Baghdad details the coup de main that broke the Saddam’s regime’s grip on Iraq. Rich with exploits of individual soldiers, tank operations, and combat this nonfiction work relates the initial success in the war when victory seemed obtainable in months not years. I thoroughly enjoy this history because it illustrates the early war’s events accurately without politicized narrative and details just how daring and complicated this decisive attack was. If more people read this history, then our society could remember and have a fairer discourse on the Iraq War.

Technically the reportage of a Rolling Stone writer embedded with Marines 2002, Evan Wright’s first-person account of young men at war is, in some ways, as much a story of the author’s experience of W’s nation building as it the story of the soldiers themselves. Wright earned the respect of the men he rolled with by riding on point, or in the lead vehicle, where he was sure to take enemy fire. It’s his description of what drove him to face such danger that makes the writer at once relatable and brave: “Partly it was about not losing face. I reverted to like, a twelve-year-old on the playground. I wouldn’t back down. And there were times when I knew we’d be shot at, and I’d fantasize about getting taken out of being embedded. But then I’d make it through and not be injured, and I’d be flooded with this deep… show more.

My War is a true story set in 2004 post-invasion Iraq told by a US Army grunt on the bottom of the totem pole.

As a former infantryman near the bottom myself, I could relate to the rollercoaster ride war grunts endure that can go from extreme boredom and amp up to fierce combat in an instance. Buzzell’s language is grunt speak which is unrefined and full of profanity, not for everyone, but it’s the perfect dialect for describing everything from battles to talking trash with other grunts.

I also appreciated that Buzzell guided us through his life as a struggling twentysomething, before joining the army, rather than taking the reader straight to battle. Gen Xers will love \m/.

My fifth book is not a novel but a true story about modern politics and warfare. 

This book is about Doctor David Kelly, a biologist like me. Kelly led the search for biological weapons in Iraq before the Iraq war. Unfortunately, he didn’t find enough evidence to suit the government of the day, but they still went ahead by issuing a now famous ‘dodgy’ and ‘sexed-up’ dossier that was the excuse to invade Iraq. Shortly afterward, on a July afternoon in a quiet part of Oxfordshire, England, Kelly went for a walk and never returned. He was found dead, slumped against a tree. 

Kelly’s death and the unanswered questions it left behind still bother me, but if you want to understand a quiet, sensitive man and the machinations of a government desperate to find a reason to declare war, then this book is a good start.