Finding Room in Beirut: Places of the Everyday demonstrates why it is worth our while to explore the value and contemporary meaning of urban areas about to undergo complete renewal. Branching off from discourses surrounding the terrain vague, the book argues that large populated urban areas meet the criteria of the vague and constitute a particular perspective from which to build a critical stance in regards to the contemporary city. But unlike a terrain vague, a vague urbain -- inhabited areas where property ownership is usually obscure and informal behaviours a daily affair -- possesses real communities and offers an alternative understanding on how a city can be practiced and how lessons should be learned before its complete transformation. Stemming from a photographic and architectural documentation of Bachoura, a central area of Beirut, Lebanon, the book shows how the vague urbain allows for different ways of inhabiting, ways that are as -- or perhaps even more -- real and anchored in the imagination of the city as those proposed by standardising developments. Building on the intricacies of found situations, improvised uses and local narratives, it is an exploration as to how the meeting of a marvellous realism with l'intrigue, the vague urbain, and temporary architecture can provide opportunities for the emergence of hidden narratives.

Everyday streets are both the most used and most undervalued of cities’ public spaces. They are places of social aggregation, bringing together those belonging to different classes, genders, ages, ethnicities and nationalities. They comprise not just the familiar outdoor spaces that we use to move and interact but also urban blocks, interiors, depths and hinterlands, which are integral to their nature and contribute to their vitality. Everyday streets are physically and socially shaped by the lives of the people and things that inhabit them through a reciprocal dance with multiple overlapping temporalities. The primary focus of this book is an inclusive approach to understanding and designing everyday streets. It offers an analysis of many aspects of everyday streets from cities around the globe. From the regular rectilinear urban blocks of Montreal to the military-regulated narrow alleyways of Naples, and from the resilient market streets of London to the crammed commercial streets of Chennai, the streets in this book were all conceived with a certain level of control. Everyday Streets is a palimpsest of methods, perspectives and recommendations that together provide a solid understanding of everyday streets, their degree of inclusiveness, and to what extent they could be more inclusive.

This new, thoroughly updated third edition of Bradt’s Lebanon remains the only English-language guide dedicated to the smallest country on the Asian continent. Comprehensively updated throughout to reflect recent economic, political and social changes, it includes revised and new listings for hotels, restaurants, and what to see and do, catering for all types of travellers and budgets. Although only half the size of Wales, Lebanon offers extraordinary diversity. Some of the world’s oldest human settlements, including the Phoenician ports of Tyre and Byblos – two of Lebanon’s five World Heritage sites – sit alongside modern Beirut. The absorbing capital is popular for its world-renowned cuisine, eclectic nightlife, mosaic of peoples and kaleidoscope of religions. In Lebanon's second city, Tripoli, busy medieval souks are watched over by a vast Crusader castle. Nearby, snow-capped mountains and the lush Qadisha Valley with its snaking river and waterfalls provide entertainment for skiers and hikers (the latter also well served by the Lebanon Mountain Trail, which runs virtually the length of the country). Three hundred days of sunshine per year makes Lebanon a ‘go anytime’ destination, with the Mediterranean coastline particularly drawing sun-seekers and watersports enthusiasts. Wildlife-lovers can enjoy Shouf Biosphere Reserve (with its famed cedar trees, the national emblem) and the Aammiq Wetlands, while Lebanon has become a major destination for religious tourism, and vinophiles can visit numerous Bekaa Valley wineries of international repute. Bradt's Lebanon offers detailed coverage of areas ignored by other guides, particularly the country’s south, as well as more extensive cultural and practical information. New for this edition are specialist features on aspects of Lebanese cultural life, additional background information, updates on work to rebuild Beirut following the 2020 explosion, extended and revised coverage of the Aammiq Wetlands, new and updated maps, and new visitor attractions including the MIM mineral museum and the Middle East’s first chocolate museum, both in Beirut. With a comprehensive language appendix covering both Arabic and French, detailed historical and religious background that helps visitors travel with awareness and sensitivity, and in-depth travel information, Bradt's Lebanon is an indispensable practical companion to visiting this excitingly varied country.

Ann Kerr’s is a personal account of an American family during the most tumultuous years of Beirut’s political strife. It begins with the tragic assassination of her husband Malcolm Kerr, one of the most respected scholars of Middle East studies, in 1984, seventeen months after he became president of the American University of Beirut. She retraces in detail the events that brought them to the Middle East, and reaches back into her childhood to describe a lifelong affinity for Lebanon. For a young American woman caring for a family in Lebanon and Egypt, life was like nothing she had ever known, but Ann Kerr approached it with a sense of adventure, which would help her deal with the beauty, chaos, and the ultimate horror of life during the country’s most volatile years of the last three decades. The personal saga of her family and the events surrounding her husband’s untimely death merge with the political episodes that have shaped U.S.-Arab relations since World War II.

This timely portrait of Lebanon exposes the fault lines that underlie the current crisis in the Middle East, and charts the country's attempts to rebuild a fragile peace after its long civil war and recent conflict with Israel. Part reportage, part travel narrative, Paradise Divided chronicles the delicate web of relationships that make up contemporary Lebanese society. Drawing on interviews with community leaders and relationships with ordinary people, it reveals a richly-textured social and religious fabric in which Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze and Christians of all kinds, from Maronite Catholics to evangelical Protestants, strive to maintain a delicate balance. It offers an insight into how Lebanon's religious communities, their identities formed by history, landscape and their relationships with one another, came to be what they are today—and how their different perspectives can lead to potentially destructive tensions. What emerges is a quintessentially Middle Eastern form of coexistence, poised between tolerance and sectarianism—a theme powerfully developed through the author’s privileged access to the normally secretive Druze. The reader follows the country’s changing fortunes after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the subsequent pro-democracy movement and withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanese soil. The final chapters examine the aftermath of Israel’s military campaign and the emergence of the new battle dividing Lebanese society as opposing camps struggle to have their vision for Lebanon made reality. Paradise Divided opens a window onto a country little-visited by Westerners for decades, and one very different from the war-torn images of the Middle East that dominate our television screens. Offering a unique view of the struggle between sectarianism and tolerance, and the relationship between the Arab world and the West, it is a book which sheds light on some of the central issues of our time.

In 1948 Secretary of State George Marshall told President Truman he'd not vote for the president's re-election should he recognize Israel--and warned that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would lead to war. More than 50 years later, war rages on, with America giving $3 billion annually in aid to Israel. Has America's one-sided policy led to terrorism on all sides? Liza Elliott, Ph.D explains here the ways the truth about the Middle East has been covered up--and runs contrary to everything Americans have learned. This book examines what politicians don't want you to know about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the reason Palestinian children find martyrdom attractive. She also discusses ways America has derailed the Palestinian statehood and supported ethnic and religious cleansing--while sidestepping the Geneva Convention. Dr. Elliott describes what life is like inside the occupied territories where America spends $10 million a day to push Palestinians off their land.