A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS - Hardcover

Worth, Robert F.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1447240537 ISBN 13: 9781447240532

Publisher: Picador, 2016

Synopsis

In 2011, a wave of revolution spread through the Middle East as protesters demanded an end to tyranny, corruption and economic decay. From Egypt to Yemen, a generation of young Arabs insisted on a new ethos of common citizenship. Their bravery and idealism stirred observers around the world and led militant jihadists to worry that they had been superseded by a new and peaceful uprising.

Five years later, the utopian aspirations of 2011 have darkened. In one country after another, brutal terrorists and dictators have risen to the top as old divides reemerge and deepen. Egypt has become a more repressive police state than ever before; Libya, Syria and Yemen endure civil war and the extremists of ISIS have spread chaos and carnage across the region, and beyond it.

A Rage for Order tracks the tormented legacy of what was once called the Arab Spring. Writing with bold literary ambition, the distinguished New York Times correspondent Robert F. Worth introduces a riveting cast of characters. We meet a Libyan rebel who must decide whether to kill the torturer who murdered his brother; a Yemeni farmer who lives in servitude to a poetry-writing, dungeon-operating chieftain; two young Syrian women whose close friendship devolves into enmity as their sects go to war; and an Egyptian doctor who is caught between his loyalty to the Muslim Brotherhood and his hopes for a new, tolerant democracy. In a final chapter, Worth tells the moving story of the two eighty-something statesmen whose unlikely camaraderie allowed Tunisia to escape its neighbours' worst fates.

Combining dramatic storytelling with an original analysis of the Arab world today, A Rage for Order captures the psychological and actual civil wars raging throughout the Middle East and explains how the dream of an Arab renaissance gave way to a new age of discord.

About this title

Review

This is the book on the Middle East you have been waiting to read. [It] tells the story of the 2011 Arab Spring and its slide into autocracy and civil war better than I could ever imagine its being told. The volume is remarkably slender for one of such drama and scope - beautifully written . . . All great works of fiction are works of great philosophy, pondering the fundamentals of humanity. Few volumes of non-fiction ever achieve this, but Worth's does, touching essential human truths about the human condition . . . The writing is so beautiful and the storytelling so easy that you won't realize how much you are learning as you read. But there is no escaping the import of the stories. No way to read this marvellous book and not understand far more than you did before about this troubled region and the people struggling to find their way back to quiet lives (New York Times Review of Books)

Riveting, vivid, lucid, and wise, Robert F. Worth's A Rage for Order is reportage of the highest order: it illuminates current Middle Eastern crises through the daily experiences of ordinary, and extraordinary, men and women. I've read no finer or more nuanced account. (Claire Messud)

The best way to make sense of the past six years is to ask the Arab people what happened . . . Robert Worth has done just that . . . Worth narrows the field of view, using personal narratives to illuminate the larger dynamics. This is a common technique, but Mr Worth does it better than most. (Economist)

It would be hard to find a more astute and eloquent guide to this explosive corner of the Earth than Robert F. Worth. He somehow managed to be on hand for a score of crucial moments in the Arab world's great convulsions, from the vast demonstrations of Tahrir Square to a just-liberated Libyan prison to the crushing of great hopes in the years that followed. Whatever lies ahead, I suspect that, as with John Reed's reporting on the Russian Revolution, people will be reading this vivid eyewitness account for years to come. (Adam Hochschild, author of Spain in Our Hearts and To End All Wars.)

This is the book you have to read on the Middle East - not just to understand the Arab revolutions, but to feel them as human drama and tragedy. Robert Worth is a master who writes journalism as literature and history. (George Packer, author of The Assassins' Gate and The Unwinding)

Worth . . . draws on his intimate knowledge of the Middle East to offer a penetrating, unsettling analysis . . . Informing the vivid narrative are many revealing interviews as well as the author's own eyewitness accounts of events. A crucial portrait of a deeply troubled region. (Kirkus Reviews (starred review))

Worth utilizes his long experience in the Middle East to provide a riveting survey of the origins, course of events, and causes of the dashing of so many of the dreams fueling the uprisings. He concentrates on Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Tunisia, and he effectively combines his personal observations with the experience of participants. The result is an informative, if often heartrending, account of events whose consequences are still unfolding. (Booklist)

The Arab world is in the grip of unprecedented crisis. Popular uprisings have weakened not just authoritarian rulers but the region's very foundations of security and stability. In his gripping account Robert Worth narrates the reversal in the Arab World's fortunes. First hand accounts, brimming with detail, unveil why the region rose up against dictatorship and then why it was not able to sustain democracy. Well-written and informative, A Rage for Order is an eye-opening read for policy-makers and anyone else interested in understanding the raging crisis in the Middle East. (Vali Nasr, author The Dispensable Nation and The Shia Revival)

Robert Worth's A Rage for Order is a deeply informed and moving account of the politics of the Arab world during, and since, the Arab Spring uprisings of 2010. It is beautifully written and describes the tragedies and aspirations of the Arabs struggling under the yoke of authoritarian oppression and corrosive venality. Drawing on a deep understanding of language, culture and history, Worth provides a series of finely delineated portraits, bringing to life the struggles of individual men and women in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen. There is simply no better account of the recent events that have convulsed the countries of North African and the Middle East. (Bernard A. Haykel, Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Institute for Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia at Princeton University)

A Rage for Order is an outstanding book that captures the high hopes and deep despair of average Arabs who lived through the revolutions of 2011 in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen - and their tragic aftermath. This is a brilliant contemporary history by one of The United States' most distinguished Mideast correspondents, and a compellingly readable account. (Eugene Rogan, author of The Arabs and The Fall of the Ottomans)

Book Description

A vivid portrait of the legacy of the Arab Spring, told through the stories of those who lived it, by distinguished New York Times correspondent, Robert F. Worth.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1447240537
• ISBN 13: 9781447240532
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272