Power, Faith And Fantasy
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Power, Faith And Fantasy
''Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present'', a history of American involvement in the Middle East by Michael Oren, was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2007 and quickly became a New York Times bestseller. The ''Power'' in the title refers to the United States' military, diplomatic and financial strength to pursue its interests in the Middle East. ''Faith'', in the words of Oren, refers to "impact of religion in the shaping of American attitudes and policies toward the Middle East." And ''fantasy'' refers to the image Americans themselves shaped of the Middle East. The audiobook version is performed by Norman Dietz.Publishers Weekly Review
, Publishers Weekly, July 30, 2007


Thesis

In Oren's narrative, the present resembles the past. The new American republic was immediately for ...
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Middle East
The Middle East ( ar, الشرق الأوسط, ISO 233: ) is a geopolitical region commonly encompassing Arabian Peninsula, Arabia (including the Arabian Peninsula and Bahrain), Anatolia, Asia Minor (Asian part of Turkey except Hatay Province), East Thrace (European part of Turkey), Egypt, Iran, the Levant (including Syria (region), Ash-Shām and Cyprus), Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), and the Socotra Governorate, Socotra Archipelago (a part of Yemen). The term came into widespread usage as a replacement of the term Near East (as opposed to the Far East) beginning in the early 20th century. The term "Middle East" has led to some confusion over its changing definitions, and has been viewed by some to be discriminatory or too Eurocentrism, Eurocentric. The region includes the vast majority of the territories included in the closely associated definition of Western Asia (including Iran), but without the South Caucasus, and additionally includes all of Egypt (not just the Sina ...
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Michael Oren
Michael Bornstein Oren (Hebrew: מיכאל אורן; born Michael Scott Bornstein; May 20, 1955) is an American-born Israeli historian, author, politician, former ambassador to the United States (2009–2013), former member of the Knesset for the Kulanu party and a former Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister's Office. Oren has written books, articles, and essays on Middle Eastern history, and is the author of the ''New York Times'' best-selling ''Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide'', ''Power, Faith and Fantasy'', and '' Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East'', which won the ''Los Angeles Times'' History Book of the Year Award and the National Jewish Book Award. Oren has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown universities in the United States and at Ben-Gurion and Hebrew universities in Israel. He was a Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and a contributing editor to ''The New Republic''. ''The Forward'' n ...
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Audiobook
An audiobook (or a talking book) is a recording of a book or other work being read out loud. A reading of the complete text is described as "unabridged", while readings of shorter versions are abridgements. Spoken audio has been available in schools and public libraries and to a lesser extent in music shops since the 1930s. Many spoken word albums were made prior to the age of cassettes, compact discs, and downloadable audio, often of poetry and plays rather than books. It was not until the 1980s that the medium began to attract book retailers, and then book retailers started displaying audiobooks on bookshelves rather than in separate displays. Etymology The term "talking book" came into being in the 1930s with government programs designed for blind readers, while the term "audiobook" came into use during the 1970s when audiocassettes began to replace phonograph records. In 1994, the Audio Publishers Association established the term "audiobook" as the industry standard. H ...
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Commentary (magazine)
''Commentary'' is a monthly American magazine on religion, Judaism, and politics, as well as social and cultural issues. Founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 under Elliot E. Cohen, editor from 1945 to 1959, ''Commentary'' magazine developed into the leading postwar journal of Jewish affairs. The periodical strove to construct a new American Jewish identity while processing the events of the Holocaust, the formation of the State of Israel, and the Cold War. Norman Podhoretz edited the magazine in its heyday from 1960 to 1995. Besides its coverage of cultural issues, ''Commentary'' provided a voice for the anti-Stalinist left. As Podhoretz shifted from his original ideological beliefs as a liberal Democrat to neoconservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, he moved the magazine with him to the right and toward the Republican Party. History Founding and early years ''Commentary'' was the successor to the ''Contemporary Jewish Record'', which was published by the American Jewis ...
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Hillel Halkin
Hillel Halkin ( he, הלל הלקין; born 1939) is an American-born Israeli translator, biographer, literary critic, and novelist, who has lived in Israel since 1970. Biography Hillel Halkin was born in New York City two months before the outbreak of World War II. He was the son of Abraham S. Halkin, then a professor of Jewish literature, history, and culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and his wife Shulamit, a daughter of Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan. In 1970 he made '' aliyah'' to Israel, settling in Zikhron Ya'akov. He studied English literature at Columbia University."Anglo translators [first in a series]: Like being the dance partner of the grea ...
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Idealism In International Relations
Idealism in the foreign policy context holds that a nation-state should make its internal political philosophy the goal of its conduct and rhetoric in international affairs. For example, an idealist might believe that ending poverty at home should be coupled with tackling poverty abroad. Both within and outside of the United States, American president Woodrow Wilson is widely considered an early advocate of idealism and codifier of its practical meaning; specific actions cited include the issuing of the famous "Fourteen Points". Wilson's idealism was a precursor to liberal international relations theory, the particular set of viewpoints arising amongst the so-called "institution builders" after World War II. Organizations that came about as a direct result of the war's outcome include the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United Nations (UN) among others. Given the outsize role of the U.S. in drafting and maintaining those such institutions, related doctrines include the ...
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C-SPAN
Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN ) is an American cable and satellite television network that was created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a nonprofit public service. It televises many proceedings of the United States federal government, as well as other public affairs programming. The C-SPAN network includes the television channels C-SPAN (focusing on the U.S. House of Representatives), C-SPAN2 (focusing on the U.S. Senate), and C-SPAN3 (airing other government hearings and related programming), the radio station WCSP-FM, and a group of websites which provide streaming media and archives of C-SPAN programs. C-SPAN's television channels are available to approximately 100 million cable and satellite households within the United States, while WCSP-FM is broadcast on FM radio in Washington, D.C., and is available throughout the U.S. on SiriusXM, via Internet streaming, and globally through apps for iOS and Android devices. The network televises U.S. poli ...
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2007 Non-fiction Books
7 (seven) is the natural number following 6 and preceding 8. It is the only prime number preceding a cube. As an early prime number in the series of positive integers, the number seven has greatly symbolic associations in religion, mythology, superstition and philosophy. The seven Classical planets resulted in seven being the number of days in a week. It is often considered lucky in Western culture and is often seen as highly symbolic. Unlike Western culture, in Vietnamese culture, the number seven is sometimes considered unlucky. It is the first natural number whose pronunciation contains more than one syllable. Evolution of the Arabic digit In the beginning, Indians wrote 7 more or less in one stroke as a curve that looks like an uppercase vertically inverted. The western Ghubar Arabs' main contribution was to make the longer line diagonal rather than straight, though they showed some tendencies to making the digit more rectilinear. The eastern Arabs developed the digit f ...
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21st-century History Books
The 1st century was the century spanning AD 1 ( I) through AD 100 ( C) according to the Julian calendar. It is often written as the or to distinguish it from the 1st century BC (or BCE) which preceded it. The 1st century is considered part of the Classical era, epoch, or historical period. The 1st century also saw the appearance of Christianity. During this period, Europe, North Africa and the Near East fell under increasing domination by the Roman Empire, which continued expanding, most notably conquering Britain under the emperor Claudius (AD 43). The reforms introduced by Augustus during his long reign stabilized the empire after the turmoil of the previous century's civil wars. Later in the century the Julio-Claudian dynasty, which had been founded by Augustus, came to an end with the suicide of Nero in AD 68. There followed the famous Year of Four Emperors, a brief period of civil war and instability, which was finally brought to an end by Vespasian, ninth Roman emperor, a ...
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Books About Foreign Relations Of The United States
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a b ...
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History Books About The Middle East
History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of these events. Historians seek knowledge of the past using historical sources such as written documents, oral accounts, art and material artifacts, and ecological markers. History is not complete and still has debatable mysteries. History is also an academic discipline which uses narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events, and investigate their patterns of cause and effect. Historians often debate which narrative best explains an event, as well as the significance of different causes and effects. Historians also debate the nature of history as an end in itself, as well as its usefulness to give perspective on the problems of the p ...
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