The Sheikh of Baghdad is the true story of one man's journey across two continents to find his place in the world. It is an unbelievable rags-to-riches-to-rags story with wrestling as a metaphor for life itself. Adnan Alkaissy, better known as professional wrestling's General Adnan, can finally, safely, tell his story now that Saddam Hussein-a childhood companion, powerful associate, then threat to Alkaissy and his family-is in custody awaiting trial. An odd juxtaposition of two very different worlds, this incomparable life story encompasses both the hilarious tales of what life was like in and out of the squared circle of professional wrestling and stories of heartache and despair from a man whose country is trying to find itself once again. It is also the story of a man's desire to achieve closure on a separate life lived many years ago. Finally, it is a story about a man, now in his midsixties, who wants nothing more than to go home to a free and democratic Iraq so that he can finally introduce his new family to his old one. The Sheikh of Baghdad is the story of an Iraqi American trying to make a difference in this post-9-11 world by telling his story to provide a small ray of hope for peace in the tumultuous Middle East. Book jacket.

In Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, celebrated young travelwriter-historian Justin Marozzi gives us a many-layered history of one of the world's truly great cities - both its spectacular golden ages and its terrible disasters 'Justin Marozzi is the most brilliant of the new generation of travelwriter-historians' - Sunday Telegraph Over thirteen centuries, Baghdad has enjoyed both cultural and commercial pre-eminence, boasting artistic and intellectual sophistication and an economy once the envy of the world. It was here, in the time of the Caliphs, that the Thousand and One Nights were set. Yet it has also been a city of great hardships, beset by epidemics, famines, floods, and numerous foreign invasions which have brought terrible bloodshed. This is the history of its storytellers and its tyrants, of its philosophers and conquerors. Here, in the first new history of Baghdad in nearly 80 years, Justin Marozzi brings to life the whole tumultuous history of what was once the greatest capital on earth. Justin Marozzi is a Councillor of the Royal Geographic Society and a Senior Research Fellow at Buckingham University. He has broadcast for BBC Radio Four, and regularly contributes to a wide range of publications, including the Financial Times, for which he has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur. His previous books include the bestselling Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year (2004), and The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus.

This definitive biography of Vince McMahon, former WWE chairman and CEO, is “riveting, essential reading” (Rick Perlstein, New York Times bestselling author) as it charts his rise from rural poverty to the throne of one of the world’s most influential media empires. Featuring exclusive interviews with more than 150 people who witnessed, aided, and suffered from his ascent. Even if you’ve never watched a minute of professional wrestling, you are living in Vince McMahon’s world. In his four decades as the defining figure of American pro wrestling, McMahon was the man behind Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, John Cena, Dave Bautista, Bret “The Hitman” Hart, and Hulk Hogan, to name just a few of the mega-stars who owe him their careers. For more than twenty-five years, he has also been a performer in his own show, acting as the diabolical “Mr. McMahon”—a figure who may have more in common with the real Vince than he would care to admit. Just as importantly, McMahon is one of Donald Trump’s closest friends—and Trump’s experiences as a performer in McMahon’s programming were, in many ways, a dress rehearsal for the 45th President’s campaigns and presidency. McMahon and his wife, Linda, are major Republican donors. Linda was in Trump’s cabinet. McMahon makes deals with the Saudi government worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And for generations of people who have watched wrestling, he has been a defining cultural force and has helped foment “the worst of contemporary politics” (Kirkus Reviews). Ringmaster built on exclusive interviews with more than 150 people, from McMahon’s childhood friends to those who accuse him of destroying their lives. “Smart, entertaining, impressively reported, and beautifully written. Wrestling fans will devour it, but everyone who wants to better understand this crazy country and one of its truly original characters ought to read it” (Jonathan Eig, author of Ali: A Life).

Consorts of the Caliphs is a seventh/thirteenth-century compilation of anecdotes about thirty-eight women who were, as the title suggests, consorts to those in power, most of them concubines of the early Abbasid caliphs and wives of latter-day caliphs and sultans. This slim but illuminating volume is one of the few surviving texts by Ibn al-Saʿi (d. 674 H/1276 AD). Ibn al-Saʿi was a prolific Baghdadi scholar who chronicled the academic and political elites of his city, and whose career straddled the final years of the Abbasid dynasty and the period following the cataclysmic Mongol invasion of 656 H/1258 AD.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was crucial for the development of Kurdish nationalism. It coincided with the reign of Abdulhamid II (1876-1909), who emphasized Pan-Islamic policies in order to strengthen the Ottoman Empire against European and Russian imperialism, The Pan-Islamic doctrines of the Ottoman Empire enabled sheikhs (religious leaders) from Sheikh Ubaydallah of Nehri in the 1870s and 1880s to Sheikh Said in the 1920s-to become the principal nationalist leaders of the Kurds. This represented a new development in Middle Eastern and Islamic history and began an important historical pattern in the Middle East long before the emergence of the religiousnationalist leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. This is the first work in any Western language dealing with the development of Kurdish nationalism during this period and is supported with documentation not previously utilized, principally from the Public Record Office in Great Britain. In addition, the author provides much new material on Turkish, Armenian, Iranian, and Arab history and new insights into Turkish-Armenian relations during the most crucial era of the history of these two peoples.

What happens to our pop culture when it meets another culture head-on—especially one that, according to some, is completely at odds with our own? In The Sheikh’s Batmobile, pop culture commentator Richard Poplak sets out on an unusual two-year odyssey. His mission is to see what becomes of his and America’s obsessions—pop songs and sitcoms, Hollywood movies and shoot-'em-up video games, muscle cars and punk music—when they make their way into the Muslim world. Over the course of his journey, Poplak gets body-slammed by WWE fans in Afghanistan, hangs out with hip-hop artists in Palestine, headbangs to heavy metal in Cairo, discovers a world of extreme makeovers in Beirut, bowls with the chief of police in small-town Kazakhstan, and encounters a mysterious Texan who builds rocket-propelled Batmobiles for a clientele of sheikhs. With uproarious humor and keen cultural insight, Poplak asks some vital questions: How is American pop culture consumed and reinterpreted in the Islamic world? What does that say about how we are viewed by young Muslims? And can Homer Simpson bridge the divisions that are tearing our world apart?

A spectacular generational saga of the making (and undoing) of a family dynasty: the riveting untold story of the gilded Jewish Bagdadi Sassoons, who built a vast empire through global finance and trade—cotton, opium, shipping, banking—that reached across three continents and ultimately changed the destinies of nations. With full access to rare family photographs and archives. “Engaging...compelling...well-paced and supremely satisfying. ”—The New York Times They were one of the richest families in the world for two hundred years, from the 19th century to the 20th, and were known as ‘the Rothschilds of the East.’ Mesopotamian in origin, and for more than forty years the chief treasurers to the pashas of Baghdad and Basra, they were forced to flee to Bushir on the Persian Gulf; David Sassoon and sons starting over with nothing, and beginning to trade in India in cotton and opium. The Sassoons soon were building textile mills and factories, and setting up branches in shipping in China, and expanding beyond, to Japan, and further west, to Paris and London. They became members of British parliament; were knighted; and owned and edited Britain’s leading newspapers, including The Sunday Times and The Observer. And in 1887, the exalted dynasty of Sassoon joined forces with the banking empire of Rothschild and were soon joined by marriage, fusing together two of the biggest Jewish commerce and banking families in the world. Against the monumental canvas of two centuries of the Ottoman Empire and the changing face of the Far East, across Europe and Great Britain during the time of its farthest reach, Joseph Sassoon gives us a riveting generational saga of the making of this magnificent family dynasty.