Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East

must say, it changes my prospective about many historical events in the area! Its a good book to start your own debate about the period during Asad's life. It gives you a insight about the man's human side and struggles to control his destiny...I loved the book...

This is such a superb work, that the title of this review warranted alliteration. Still pretty much one of the best works on modern Syria: simultaneously a biography, a history, and an analysis of inter-state machinations in the Middle East. Nice narrative flow, much of it based on interviews with the persons involved, including Asad himself. I really can't recommend this enough. Anyone with even a remotely passing interest in the Middle East should read this book. A pity Seale didn't produce more works as this and his other work "The Struggle for Syria", which covers an earlier period, are so freakin' amazing! I also recommend, as a companion piece "The Lion of Damascus" by David Lesch, a biography of Asad's son, the current Syrian president, Bashar al-'Asad.

This really is the only good source of information about Asad. It is essential to understanding the conflict in the Middle East and understanding how Syria got to where they are today. While it could use some updating overall the information is very good. It stays on point and if anything goes into too much detail. Syria is a mess politically and frequent assignations occur throughout the book. Keeping a list of people and crossing them off is very helpful as you read through. The book does an excellent job of putting Syria in perspective and really it is the only good Syrian history I have found.

Although this book purports to be a biography of Asad, it is really a whirlwind tour of 20th-century Syrian history. The book's main focus is on its foreign relations with the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and the United States. With clarity and insight, Seale details such seminal events as the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, the Middle East peace process, and the Gulf Wars. Seale provides the perfect balance of explanation and analysis while never getting bogged down in useless detail. Useful analyses of such key figures as Sadat, Begin, and Sharon are just as relevant today as they were when this book was written. His detailing of Asad's relationship with Kissinger is enough to make the reader cringe for, unfortunately, Kissinger's duplicity and manipulations were not limited to such places as Chile,Kurdistan,etc. This book is invaluable for its enumeration on the political situation in the Middle East. Valuable to the reader struggling to gain an overall understanding of the Middle East, this book also shrewdly portrays Asad's rise to power both in his own country and in the Middle East.

Patrick Seale wrote this book based on a request from the Syrian president, Hafez al-Asad. He tried all of his best to show al-Asad as a hero but since he showed many secrets in his book such as the revolution of Hama (1982), this book became prohibited in Syria. Patrick Seale did not try to make his own conclusions or to quote from the CIA's reports. Instead, he wrote this book based on personal interviews with many Syrian officers including the president himself. This book was translated to French, Arabic, and many other languages. It has many secrets that it is hard to find in any other book.