Volume 55, Number 18 · November 20, 2008
Fishing in the Dead Sea
By Colin Thubron
Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace
by Avi Shlaim
Knopf, 723 pp., $35.00
King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life
by Nigel Ashton
Yale University Press, 431 pp., $35.00
The Arab Center: The Promise of Moderation
by Marwan Muasher
Yale University Press, 312 pp., $30.00
Of all the Arab nations created out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Emirate of Transjordan was the most ill-favored. A barren splinter of land tapering south to the Red Sea, its borders made no political or geographical sense. It was home to just 230,000 people, and had a single railway line and scarcely a road. Crucially, in later years—1948–1949, 1967—it would be drowned in waves of Palestinian refugees. Plagued by water scarcity, it had few industrial resources and no oil.
Review, 4203 words
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