The best books on the East–West dichotomy

The Devil’s Road To Kathmandu is a tense, fast-paced, and kaleidoscopic pulp thriller, following the lives of two generations of drifters embroiled in a saga of sex, drugs, and murder on the road between London and the Indian subcontinent. 

In 1976, four friends drive a bus along the hippy trail from London to Kathmandu. En Route in Pakistan, a drug deal goes badly wrong, yet the boys escape with their lives and the narcotics. Thousands of kilometers, numerous acid trips, accidents, nightclubs, and even a pair of beautiful Siamese twins later, as they finally reach the counter-culture capital of the world, Kathmandu, one of them disappears with the drug money. A quarter-century later, after receiving mysterious emails inviting them to pick up their share of the money, the remaining three companions are back in Kathmandu, trying to solve a 25-year old mystery that leads them to a dramatic showdown with their past.

Through a country-by-country approach, this book provides a detailed analysis of the complexities of reporting from and on the Middle East. Each chapter provides an overview of a country, including the political context, relationships to international politics, and the key elements relating to the place as covered in Anglo-American media. The book explores how the media can be used to serve particular political agendas on both a regional and international level. This book questions how orientalism manifests itself in the coverage and how. 

In the 1980s, religious conservativism gained momentum in Egypt. At the time a column appeared in Al-Ahram written by a self-described humanist addressing readers’ questions about personal problems. Also, religious sheiks in numerous newspapers answered readers’ questions about Islam’s views of the morality of certain behaviors. The two types of columns differed in their prescriptions for how to achieve the good life—the humanist by recommending time-tested traditions and the sheikhs by telling readers to comply with their Islamic duties. Both addressed extremism cautiously, probably out of fear of Islamists’ reactions. The sheikhs, although salaried government employees, showed a perplexing ambivalence by vacillating between support for government positions and contradictory extremist positions. This was partly to make themselves appear independent of government control but also to avoid angering the Islamists.

In 1833, a young Charles Darwin met a species in the Falkland Islands that astonished him: tame, curious birds of prey that looked and acted like a cross between a hawk and a crow. They stole hats and other objects from the crew of the Beagle, and Darwin wondered why they were confined to a few islands at the bottom of the world. But he set this mystery aside, and never returned to it—and a chance meeting with these unique birds, now called striated caracaras, led Jonathan Meiburg to pick up where Darwin left off, sending him on a grand and captivating odyssey across thousands of miles and millions of years. “To call this a bird book,” wrote The Dallas Morning News, “would be like calling Moby-Dick a whaling manual.”     

Galen of Pergamum, a Greek doctor in ancient Rome, is a fascinating figure, doctor to several Roman Emperors, a prolific writer, an overbearing egotist, a medical genius, an acute observer, and intelligent thinker, whose influence lasted for a millennium and a half. I have tried to explain the complexities of a man whose writings still provoke admiration or dissent, but rarely allow neutrality.

When Swedish-born Linda Åkeson McGurk moved to Indiana, she quickly learned that the nature-centric parenting philosophies of her native Scandinavia were not the norm. In Sweden, children play outdoors year-round, regardless of the weather. In the US, McGurk found the playgrounds deserted, and preschoolers were getting drilled on academics with little time for free play in nature. 

Struggling to decide what was best for her family, McGurk embarked on a journey to Sweden with her two daughters to see how their lives would change in a place where spending time in nature is considered essential to a good childhood. There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather is a fascinating personal narrative that illustrates how Scandinavian culture could hold the key to raising healthy, resilient, and confident children in America.

For over a century, the most divisive question in political thought has been about the size of the state. This dilemma might have made sense in earlier decades. Now, with a world transformed by Covid-19 and a revolution unfolding in the technologies of organization, a great upheaval is also coming in the essential business of government.

In How Should a Government Be? The New Levers of State Power I examine: how governments around the world are using technology and organization to transform how they deliver for their citizens; the challenges and opportunities that these new technologies and forms of organization pose; and how all this is even more imperative in a post-Covid-19 world of mass support schemes and unprecedented levels of surveillance.

This book looks at queenship in a global, timeless sense—examining the role of queens, empresses, and other royal women from the ancient and classical period through to nearly the present day on every continent. By taking a ‘long view’ of queenship, we can start to see connecting threads over time and place and comparisons of how the queen’s role differed in various cultural contexts. A wide variety of examples, including both more familiar figures and lesser-known but equally fascinating royal women, are given to explain key themes in queenship: family and dynasty, rulership, and image crafting.

Fundamentally, this book offers a fresh perspective on queenship which enables new insights into the queen’s role as the most eminent woman in the realm.

Scientist, diplomat, and spy, Aaron Aaronsohn’s fascinating story will come as a major surprise to most students of Middle Eastern history. The early 20th-century agronomist and hydrologist’s exploits easily rival those of the fabled Lawrence of Arabia.

Emigrating as a small child to Palestine with his Romanian parents ahead of a wave of pogroms in 1882, Aaronsohn grew up to create the first comprehensive water maps of Palestine and Syria, maps later used to draft the region’s new boundaries at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. A history that speaks directly to the present, Aaronsohn’s Maps reveals for the first time Aaronsohn’s foresight in establishing water, not oil, as the driving force in Middle East politics, and the enduring importance of his maps today.

One big difference between the British Empire and the American world hegemony that replaced it was that servants of the former either traveled extensively or lived almost their whole working lives in eastern lands. If you read Robert Kaplan’s The Arabists and thought the people who serve the US’s interests in the Arab world a bit strange, compare them to the British travelers and diplomats in my book!

From the idiosyncratic Scotsman David Urquhart, who in the 1830s engaged in cross-cultural dressing while working at the British embassy in Constantinople, to the imperious George Curzon, later Viceroy of India, who traveled in Persia and Afghanistan in the 1880s, these Britishers acquired a sympathy and affinity for the East.