In April 2003, I said goodbye to my husband and children before leaving for Kuwait on a 12-month hardship tour. It was to be at least six months before mid-tour, if leave would be allowed by then. Checked in, and caught Lufthansa out of Frankfurt. Ever have one of those dreams in which you taxi forever and go nowhere? This was one of those off the end of the earth type experiences. With that, U.S. Army Physician Holly Doyne departed Germany for an assignment to Camp Doha as Command Surgeon, ARCENT-Kuwait, for what became a prolonged tour. This is her record of that time. It is about battling with the heat and the dust in the desert. It is about ordered chaos and confusion tempered with caring. It is a warm and lively account by a determined and compassionate physician who went to conquer, assigned to a location where making a difference really mattered.

As the first Gulf city to experience oil urbanization, Kuwait City's transformation in the mid-twentieth century inaugurated a now-familiar regional narrative: a small traditional town of mudbrick courtyard houses and plentiful foot traffic transformed into a modern city with marble-fronted buildings, vast suburbs, and wide highways. In Kuwait Transformed, Farah Al-Nakib connects the city's past and present, from its settlement in 1716 to the twenty-first century, through the bridge of oil discovery. She traces the relationships between the urban landscape, patterns and practices of everyday life, and social behaviors and relations in Kuwait. The history that emerges reveals how decades of urban planning, suburbanization, and privatization have eroded an open, tolerant society and given rise to the insularity, xenophobia, and divisiveness that characterize Kuwaiti social relations today. The book makes a call for a restoration of the city that modern planning eliminated. But this is not simply a case of nostalgia for a lost landscape, lifestyle, or community. It is a claim for a "right to the city"—the right of all inhabitants to shape and use the spaces of their city to meet their own needs and desires.

Based on extensive research of British documents from the Public Records Office, and American documents from the National Archives and several Presidential Libraries, this book surveys events in Kuwait from the beginning of the twentieth century until the Second World War, and explains Britain's initial interest in the ruling al-Sabah family, before focusing on the post-1945 period.

Sheikh Mubarak was the founder of the modern state of Kuwait. But the man who actually led Kuwait to modernity was his son Abdullah Mubarak Al-Sabah, one of the most significant figures of Kuwait from the 1940s to Kuwaiti independence in 1961. Largely responsible for the creation of the Kuwaiti defence forces, Abdullah Mubarak Al-Sabah made a point of prioritising what he saw to be Kuwait's national interests in the face of British, American and Iranian pressures during a crucial period of change. He developed carefully crafted, cautious relations with foreign oil companies and secured Kuwait's economic standing through his driven and single-minded policies. The author here presents this part-biography, part-history of modern Kuwait, with fresh new research and insights. From America's drive to build stronger connections in the region in the 1950s, when both the Cold War and Arab nationalisms were in full play, to sensitive diplomatic issues such as water, border disputes and difficult interactions with Iraq, especially following the 1958 revolution of Abd al-Karim Qasim, the author examines Kuwait's relations with its neighbours and the West, and the role played by this pivotal figure in the country's history and development. This book makes a significant contribution to understanding the complex politics of modern Kuwait and the recent history of the Gulf States.

This book asks why in recent years the social and economic upheavals in Kuwait and Qatar have been accompanied by a remarkable political continuity.