Volume 37, Number 12 · July 19, 1990
In a Fratricidal Country
By Peter Partner
Tribes with Flags: A Dangerous Passage Through the Chaos of the Middle East
by Charles Glass
Atlantic Monthly Press, 510 pp., $22.95
Three years ago Charles Glass decided to take time off from his work as an ABC television reporter in Beirut to make and record a trip through the countries of the eastern Mediterranean. His itinerary began in Alexandretta in southern Turkey, and was to have taken him through Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan, to end on the edge of the Sinai peninsula in Aqaba. He borrowed an old-fashioned term and called the whole region 'the Levant,' and he seems to see his book as carrying forward the nineteenth-century tradition of 'Levantine travels.' He intended—and to a limited extent the book he has actually written does this—to compare the texts of the old travel books about Lebanon with the conditions he found there in 1987.
Review, 4642 words
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