Land Between the Rivers

Land Between the Rivers is the result of ten years of research, writing, and thinking about the subject. It is an enormous topic: five thousand years, beginning with Gilgamesh at the edge of historical time. It is a big topic in another way. More than anywhere else, the famous Land Between the Rivers, where civilization was born, where East and West have mixed and clashed since long before Alexander, has led an existence that could be called, from a certain perspective, a history of the world. We begin the story with ancient Sumer, and Gilgamesh building the walls of Uruk ('Iraq') to make a great name for himself around the turn of the third millennium BC. We end it in 1958, as the last royal family of Iraq is slaughtered on the steps of a small royal palace in Baghdad, the most effervescent, free, and promising capital in the Middle East. Above all, the story of Iraq, the world's hinge country, is that of the great clash pitting humanism against the outlooks of power and fate.

Bartle Bull is a former editor of the Middle East Monitor and foreign editor of Prospect magazine. He has written from the Middle East for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Foreign Policy, Die Welt and other publications. His work, widely syndicated in Europe and the United States, has been featured in Corriere della Sera, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. He has appeared many times on radio and television and is most frequently a guest on Fox Business News; he has also appeared on the BBC, NPR, Fox News and Al Jazeera.