Volume 54, Number 11 · June 28, 2007

Lebanon's Agony

By Max Rodenbeck
Killing Mr. Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East
by Nicholas Blanford

I.B. Tauris, 236 pp., $27.95

Hezbollah: A Short History
by Augustus Richard Norton

Princeton University Press, 187 pp., $16.95

Hizbullah: The Story from Within
by Naim Qassem

Saqi Books, 284 pp., $42.50

Everyday Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam Among Palestinians in Lebanon
by Bernard Rougier, translated from the French by Pascale Ghazaleh

Harvard University Press, 333 pp., $28.95

'This country is like a cake. On the top it is cream. Underneath it is fire.' So a Hezbollah spokesman told me last June, speaking in the shabby Beirut apartment that served as the party's press office until an avalanche of Israeli ordnance leveled the building, along with the surrounding neighborhood, in the war that flared a few weeks later. Intimated as a bit of finger-wagging local wisdom, the clumsy metaphor seemed hackneyed at the time.



Review, 5583 words

To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:

If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in:

To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below.

I agree to the terms and conditions for this service.

To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below.

I agree to the terms and conditions for this service.


Search the Review
Advanced search