Michael Bell

Timed for release with the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Michelle Shephard’s Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism’s Grey Zone ploughs through the world of terrorism over the decade since. Shephard, the Toronto Star’s national security correspondent, travelled widely through the hotbeds of discontent from Pakistan’s federally administered tribal agencies to Mogadishu and on through the no man’s land of Yemen gathering material for this compelling…

Castles Made of Sand: A Century of Anglo-American Espionage and Intervention in the Middle East is a swashbuckling saga. It is the story of generations of imperial and colonial rogues who the author claims bludgeoned and intimidated unsuspecting Middle Eastern leaders—indeed, figuratively raped and humiliated them—into serving British and American interests, plus their own often pecuniary…

Gwynne Dyer, the well-known Canadian journalist, broadcaster and military historian, has produced yet another polemical and damning analysis of our contemporary world with The Mess They Made: The Middle East After Iraq. This indictment of the Bush administration’s Middle East policy is not only a venomous attack on Washington’s venture into regime change but an examination of American policy in the Middle East as a…