Contributions by:
Emad El-Din Aysha
An intellectually formidable friend and I were discussing everything under the sun at a qahwa (coffee shop) in Cairo, fairly late at night and dead in the middle of winter. I brought up Greg Palast’s account of the Iraq war and the squabbles between the two main advocates of the war – the neo-cons and…
Read Full Article...Intriguing, entertaining and frighteningly plausible. That, in a nutshell, describes Kyle Mills’ political thriller, The Second Horseman, an ‘airport reading rack’ novel about a nuclear holocaust facing the Middle East as a unquestioningly pro-Israel America stokes Islamic fanaticism. Despite some loose ends and plot hiccups, this is by far the best of Mills’ works and…
Read Full Article...While a devout fan of British spy novels in general and John le Carré in particular, I think he really overdid it in his latest novel, Absolute Friends. It is confusing, inept and cut short halfway through the events when things just begin to get interesting. (It beats around the bush even more than The…
Read Full Article...Reviewed by Emad El-Din Aysha The swan song of the literary missionary! While not the best of John le Carré’s novels, The Mission Song is certainly far ahead of his previous symbolic disaster, Absolute Friends, and once again proves that he is the master of the post-Cold War political thriller and factually way ahead of…
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