Media Reviews
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
Worth traces the 'Arab Spring' through five countries, from the heady idealism of 2011 to the largely grim aftermath. Significantly, he does so through the stories of individuals rather than groups or sects, challenging simplistic, monolithic conceptions of rival factions . . . Worth provides no easy path forward. Instead, he skillfully presents the competing perspectives in play to explain the daunting impediments to stable states in the present-day Middle East * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *
What [Worth] accomplishes in A Rage for Order is to repaint some of those faces lost among the bloody coverage of warfare and tub-thumping rhetoric . . . it's the individual stories which give the book its impact * Stuff.co.nz *
[Worth] maps the transformative moments of the Arab revolutions, starting from Egypt, moving through Libya, Syria, Yemen and Tunisia . . . [he] is adept at explaining genealogical histories and deftly melds them with people's stories * Australian *
A Rage for Order offers vital lessons to help us understand a region whose conflicts rage on * NPR *
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