Thought provoking - an essentail - Rated 
This is a mightily impressive book, though in no way an easy read. It's not just the size (nearly 1,300 pages) it's the unrelenting horror that Fisk decribes. Ongoing decriptions of the inhumanity and evil he has encountered either directly or from eye witness testiment makes it a painful read right upto the end of the book.
In the book Fisk takes through a history of the Middle East conflicts he has covered as a journalist in the past 30 years from the Soviet invasion of Afgahnistan through to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, including the Iran-Iraq war, Iraeli-Palistinian conflict, Algeria and also including a chapter on the Armenian genocide. Throughout there is a reference back to historical events that have shaped the conflict and this is interwoven with a personal history of his parents and especially Fisk's journey to find out more about his father and his service at the end of the 1st World War.
This though, is no straight historical account, Fisk is constantly giving his viewpoint. He pulls no punches and his utter contempt for the corrupt and despotic regimes in the region is only beaten by his ongoing contempt of the involvement of the West in the region (and specifically America's support of Israel). He expertly and consistently shows up the hypocrisy and the self serving power politics, and the awful results it has on the populations of the region. It is this that makes the book, giving it power and is what sets you thinking. At the end of it you cannot fail to have changed some of your views, or to feel more passionately about the issues (you'll listen more carefully to the next news bulletin from Gaza or the West Bank). I for one, though, cannot agree with all that he says and the arguments he makes. It is very easy to point out all the time where people have made mistakes, taken the wrong decisions (whether the motive was good or bad). It's altogether more difficult to praise people having to make difficult decisions when there can never be an bloodless outcome, or to suggest the best way forward. This is where I feel Fisk doesn't deliver. At the end of the book I knew the true horror of the conflicts, the problems and the suffering there is. What I didn't have any sense of was what's the best way forward. I would have hoped that a man of Fisk's integrity, intelligence and knowledge of the area could have given his thoughts and ideas on this. I think he could have given us some hope, but the end I couldn't find any.
Neverless, this beats an pure narrative account of the recent history of the Middle East, it draws you in, makes you empathise and feel involved. It makes you think and makes you care, and that is no small achievement.
an absolutely exceptional book about the Middle East - Rated
Though I have seldom read books about the Middle East, I was absolutely fascinated by this one. The quality of Fisk's writing about this region is as high as Shirer's writing about the Nazi Germany, an exceptional testimony, full of personal experiences and reflections in depth, with a great sense of humanity.
It is difficult to forget the meeting with Ben Laden, the adventures on the roas of Afghanistan, or the visit of hospitals in Irak. Absolutely brilliant about the past and the present, and also a warning for the future.
People have a problem with Fisk because he tells it like it is - Rated
Yes it's a long book, but it's totally worth it. Be prepared to be enlightened on the Middle East; not just in it's current state but also, maybe more importantly, the history behind it. The book isn't impartial and rightly so. Fisk tends to concentrate on the ordinary people affected by war and their stories so the writing is at times very passionate and graphic.
Not much more to say as everything seems to have been said by previous reviewers. This is one purchase I'll never regret and a book I'll be looking through again and again in the future.
CIVILISATION - IN FLAGRANTE DELICTO - Rated
CIVILISATION - IN FLAGRANTE DELICTO
THE BLOODY YEARS of Bush the Son are drawing swiftly to an end. In a matter of months, he will no longer occupy the White House and on present evidence will find his replacement to be a black-skinned Democrat - a vindication of sorts, and at last, for the strange creature that likes to call itself democracy, American-style.
The front-man for the invasion of Iraq - perhaps the worst managed imperial adventure in history - will return to the bosom of his Texan (and Saudi) friends, the remaining neo-cons will slink back to their ivory towers, and the old military-industrial complex of banks and guns and oil will go on in much the same way as before.
In the months and years that follow the demission of Bush, the record of American (and British) policy with regard to Iraq will come under intense scrutiny. It remains to be seen just what skullduggery might yet come to light, not least with regard to the trotting Whore of Fettes and his profoundly duplicitous role in the entire adventure.
But we can be rather more precise about what actually happened in Iraq, of course. A junta in America's corporate and neo-conservative foreign policy establishments saw an opportunity to use American military might in the cause of destroying Iraq, establishing in its place a postmodernist Fort Laramie for the strategic domination of the region, and so ensure preferential American access to its oil and gas resources.
For this, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and the neo-Narodnik spectacle of the Twin Towers were timeous and highly convenient excuses. Had the venture been properly managed it might even have worked, and established US hegemony in the Middle East for the next quarter- or half-century. But it did not, has not and - according to all the present signs - will not. Iraq, certainly, along with its once glorious capital, has been destroyed: and the Middle East is more unstable than ever, and America's position there even more exposed (and expensive) than ever.
The why and the how of this murderous imperialist disaster for the people of the region is the principal subject of Robert Fisk's magisterial memoir of his thirty years covering the conflicts of the Middle East. In the shadow of Fox News (and, at times, the BBC) one hesitates to describe Fisk as a `journalist'.
After all, Western `reporting' of the seemingly endemic wars and troubles that arc from Lebanon to the far and dusty shores of Afghanistan bring no credit on what - at times - can be an honourable trade. But Fisk is indeed a journalist - and a writer and historian - of the highest quality and integrity, and his mighty epic of reportage is lyrical in its detail, savage in its judgements, and enormously and expertly informed in turn.
Certainly, the book sprawls well beyond the boundaries of its central focus to the Armenian Holocaust of 1915, to Britain's own last adventure in armed imperialism at Suez, to the bloodbath inherited by the Algerians in the wake of the French imperial venture there. Nor does Fisk omit scrutiny of the popular overthrow of that US satrap, the Iranian Shah, in the 1970s, and the terrible war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s.
But Fisk also brings his critical eye to rather more recent events in the region - the first invasion of Iraq by America and her puppets, the terrible reign of sanctions that followed there, and the post 9-11 invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. And then, of course, there is the continuing military (and demographic) time-bomb of Israel / Palestine to contend with .....
None of this, it can be said with absolute certainty, makes for pretty reading, from the story of the corrupt proto-fascist regimes kept in power by the Americans to the extensive use of depleted uranium ordnance in Bush the Father's invasion of Iraq. Naturally, the civilised Western reader will be only too aware that Fisk's allegations about the subsequent plague of tumours, gangrenes, missing limbs, child mastectomies and congenital shrunken heads can, of course, be no more than an Islamist lie.
After all, they were evasively denied by no less an authority than Douglas Henderson, Britain's then-minister for the armed forces. "The Government has not", opined this distinguished parliamentary militarist in 1998, "seen any peer-reviewed epidemiological research data on this population to support these claims and it would therefore be premature to comment on the matter".
Or what about the extensive physical destruction of the socialist and communist Lefts throughout so much of the Arab and Muslim worlds, at the bloody hands of secular-fascist and clerical-fascist regimes - a subject surely worthy of an up-to-date book in itself, and one which would doubtless be wondrously illuminated by the files of the CIA? Among other things, after all, this might help explain why so much of the anti-imperialist struggle in those worlds is in the hands of reactionary Islamists, tholed to a powerless politics of gesture and rhetoric born ineluctably from a long history of humiliation and defeat.
Nor does Fisk flinch from comment on the extraordinary lockgrip that America's Zionist lobby has on American media and political debate on Palestine, or on America's policies there (to no discernible advantage to the United States either). And the Western media does not emerge with much credit at all from Fisk's account of coverage of recent imperial adventures in the Middle East - journalists as fans with gasmasks, embedded propagandists, characterized by enormous self-importance and equally enormous ignorance, and all in thrall to that unwritten but immensely powerful code of self-censorship and `balance'.
But what does this matter in the grand scheme of civilised things? After all, when the Americans occupied Baghdad they watched all the ministries burn down (apart, of course, from the ministries of oil and the interior), along with the national library and archives and the capital's collection of priceless Korans.
In all, this book is a testament to Fisk's moral and often physical courage and energy. It is one of the great books of journalism, and one of the great books about journalism. It is also one of the great books in English about the Arab and Muslim world in the Middle East and beyond.
Civilisation caught in the act, indeed .....
www.iain-fraser-grigor.co.uk
Anecdotes with no analysis - Rated 
After plodding through four chapters of this huge book and finding only the author's personal impressions of events as they unfolded, I skipped ahead to the final chapters in search of summary and analysis. I found none. The whole book is simply a personal diary, a string of anecdotes, and nothing more.
The anecdotes are impressive, being vividly written by a man who was very close to the events he describes. I give it as many as three stars for that reason. But this is not the kind of book I wanted, at all. All I get out of it is a vague sense that all participants in the Middle East conflicts are guilty; and I would already have been willing to agree with that before reading any of the book.
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