Charles Glass is a writer, journalist and, broadcaster, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past fifty years. Subscribe to receive details of new books, articles and upcoming events.
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LATEST ARTICLE The Epic Story of the Little City That Cast Off AssadIn Days of Love and Rage, Anand Gopal creates an indelible portrait of revolution and civil war in Syria. “Manbij. May God protect it,” the great traveler Ibn Jubayr of Valencia wrote in June 1184. “Its skies are bright, its aspect handsome, its breezes fragrant and perfumed, and while its day gives generous shade, its night is all enchantment.” These raptures eluded me when I visited the city 800 years later, in 1987, and wrote, “It was a dull, lifeless place. Either it had lost its glory, or Ibn Jubayr, like many travelers before and since, had exaggerated: Manbij was, simply, a dump.” But Days of Love and Rage, the journalist Anand Gopal’s epic tribute to Manbij’s population during Syria’s 14-year civil war, forces me to recant. The heroic beauty of the city’s people, as Gopal portrays them, struggling for freedom with its attendant glories and travails more than compensates for the eyesore that is its motley collection of concrete hovels and Baath Party monstrosities. There have been many books about Syria since the earliest days of unrest in 2011, but the closest kin to Days of Love and Rage is Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell’s indelible 1938 portrait of the fractious partisans struggling to save the Spanish republic from dictatorship. Like Orwell’s masterpiece, Gopal’s account is destined to stand out as the definitive text of the war. Gopal, a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the author of a similarly rich telling of America’s misadventures in Afghanistan, No Good Men Among the Living, labored on this book for eight years. With the help of a research team that comprised half a dozen locals — “all protagonists of the revolution in Manbij,” he writes — Gopal collected 2,000 interviews, watched hundreds of on-scene wartime videos and read thousands of texts to tell the story of six ambitious rebels in a remote provincial town that even many Syrians had not heard of until war and revolution engulfed it… NEW TO WATCH In a series of interviews with leading historians on the History of Resistance, Charles Glass and his history students at the American University of Beirut probe deep into the heart of guerrilla warfare and resistance to foreign occupation. Watch more interviews, documentaries and films by Charles Glass here |
Charles Glass
Charles Glass is a writer, journalist and, broadcaster, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past fifty years. Subscribe to receive details of new books, articles and upcoming events.
LATEST ARTICLE Letter from Beirut: A Stubborn Indifference to War This city keeps you on your toes, as long as you hang on to them. When you walk across a one-way street, look both ways. No driver—on a motorcycle or in an SUV—hesitates to charge the wrong way up a road clearly signed for traffic to go in the opposite direction. When two cars meet head-on, the driver going the wrong way shouts abuse at the innocent one obeying the rules. Welcome to Beirut. This insouciant behavior reflects the...
OUT NOW Over nearly a half century, David Hirst was The Guardian newspaper’s indispensable voice from the Middle East A landmark collection of David Hirst's finest reporting THE PEN AND THE OLIVE BRANCH Reporting the Middle East DAVID HIRSTEdited by JANICK GOLD and CHARLES GLASSIntroduction by JONATHAN DIMBLEBY read more > PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY NEW TO WATCH In a series of interviews with leading historians on the History of Resistance, Charles Glass and his history students at the American...
LATEST ARTICLE 1970s Postcard showing the two bays of Zaytouni and Saint Georges Beirut, Now and Then On Wednesday , 8 April, Israel expanded its kill zone beyond what had been known as the ‘safe’ areas north of Beirut’s suburban south. I talked to a doctor at the American University Hospital who told me his emergency room was treating four hundred patients wounded in the bombing. Four had died. I passed the hospital, where families outside were waiting for the medical staff’s reports. By the...