MOTHER'S DAY SPECIALS! SHOW ME MORE
'Elegant, erudite, ambitious, inventive - a remarkable blend of research, imagination and first-hand experience.' Rory Stewart
'A work of great ambition... an account that is informed, filled with insights and a cracking read too.' Peter Frankopan
A sweeping 5,000-year history of Iraq, from the reign of Gilgamesh in c.2900 BC to the coup that overthrew the monarchy in 1958.
Land Between the Rivers is the result of ten years of research, writing, and thinking about the subject. It is an enormous topic: five thousand years, beginning with Gilgamesh at the edge of historical time. It is a big topic in another way. More than anywhere else, the famous Land Between the Rivers, where civilization was born, where East and West have mixed and clashed since long before Alexander, has led an existence that could be called, from a certain perspective, a history of the world.
We begin the story with ancient Sumer, and Gilgamesh building the walls of Uruk ('Iraq') to make a great name for himself around the turn of the third millennium BC. We end it in 1958, as the last royal family of Iraq is slaughtered on the steps of a small royal palace in Baghdad, the most effervescent, free, and promising capital in the Middle East. Above all, the story of Iraq, the world's hinge country, is that of the great clash pitting humanism against the outlooks of power and fate.
Bartle Bull is a former editor of the Middle East Monitor and foreign editor of Prospect magazine. He has written from the Middle East for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Foreign Policy, Die Welt and other publications. His work, widely syndicated in Europe and the United States, has been featured in Corriere della Sera, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. He has appeared many times on radio and television and is most frequently a guest on Fox Business News; he has also appeared on the BBC, NPR, Fox News and Al Jazeera.
Elegant, erudite, ambitious, inventive - a remarkable blend of research, imagination and first-hand experience. * Rory Stewart * A work of great ambition that sets out five millennia of the history of one of the great cradles of global civilisations. Bartle Bull has done a fantastic job to explain how the land between the rivers had shaped local, regional and global affairs - and used his deep knowledge of contemporary Iraq to produce an account that is informed, filled with insights and a cracking read too.' * Peter Frankopan, bestselling author of The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed * Conceptual originality and laudable ambition... Inspired by firsthand experience of the region... A sweeping history. * New York TImes * Dazzling erudition and narrative flair come together in this superb history of Iraq. Bartle Bull has travelled the length and breadth of the country, he has toiled away in libraries and archives, and the result is a grand, sweeping book, full of insight and brimming with all the agonies and ecstasies which have befallen the cradle of civilization during its tumultuous 5,000-year story. Land Between The Rivers is essential reading' * Justin Marozzi, author of Islamic Empires * Iraq's history is that of much of human civilization and to do it justice in a single volume requires a combination of learning, discernment and flair that few possess. Bartle Bull is one of the few. Panoptic, fearless and beautifully written' * Christopher de Bellaigue, author of The Lion House and The Islamic Enlightenment * Succeeds in weaving this daunting welter of material into a work that is not just clear and coherent, but also enthralling and thought-provoking... He [...] makes excellent use of the journalist's skill of picking out a telling personal story to illustrate the wider picture... [A] masterly work of compression... Bull's enjoyable book encourages us to think more about a place that has made profound contributions to humanity and retains a geopolitical and cultural significance that we neglect at our peril. * Literary Review * Bull conveys the excitement of uncovering new intellectual treasures for the reader... Engaging research and bottomless detail by an avid observer and student of the region. * Kirkus *
