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Eric Rouleau was one of the most celebrated journalists of his generation, a status he owed to his extraordinary career, which began when Hubert Beuve-Méry, director of Le Monde, charged him with covering the Near and Middle East.
In 1963, Rouleau was invited by Gamal Abd al-Nasser to interview him in Cairo, a move which was not lost on the young Rouleau—going through him, a young Egyptian Jew who had been exiled from Egypt in late 1951, shortly before the Free Officers coup, was a means to renew diplomatic ties with de Gaulle’s France. This exclusive interview, which immediately made headlines around the world, propelled Rouleau into the center of the region’s conflicts for two decades.
Writing between Cairo and Jerusalem, Rouleau was a chief witness to the wars of 1967 and 1973, narrating their events from behind the scenes. He was to meet all the major players, including Nasser, Levi Ashkol, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon, and Anwar Sadat, painting striking portraits of each. More than a memoir, his book presents a history, lived from the inside, of the Israel–Palestine conflict.

To read an excerpt, click here.

For the Table of Contents, click here.

In October 1999 during a trip to Cairo, Cyrus Kadivar, an exiled Iranian living in London, visited the tomb of the last shah and opened a Pandora’s box. Haunted by nostalgia for a bygone era, he recalled a protected and idyllic childhood in the fabled city of Shiraz and his coming of age during the 1979 Iranian revolution. Back in London, he reflected on what had happened to him and his family after their uprooting and decided to conduct his own investigation into why he lost his country. He spent the next ten years seeking out witnesses who would shed light on the last days of Pahlavi rule. Among those he met were a former empress, ex-courtiers, disaffected revolutionaries, and the bereaved relatives of those who perished in the cataclysm.

In Farewell Shiraz, Kadivar tells the story of his family and childhood against the tumultuous backdrop of twentieth-century Iran, from the 1905–1907 Constitutional Revolution to the fall of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, before presenting accounts of his meetings with key witnesses to the Shah’s fall and the rise of Khomeini. Each of the people interviewed provides a richly detailed picture of the momentous events that took place and the human drama behind them.

Combining exquisite vignettes with rare testimonials and first-hand interviews, Farewell Shiraz draws us into a sweeping yet often intimate account of a vanished world and offers a compelling investigation into a political earthquake whose reverberations still live with us today.

Click here to browse the author’s website.

To read an excerpt, click here.

For the Table of Contents, click here.

“I have many wonderful memories of Shiraz.”–Cyrus Kadivar. Click here to read the blog post by the author.

In 2019, the American University in Cairo (AUC) celebrates its centenary. Founded on Tahrir Square, the university has been at the center of the intellectual, social, and cultural life of Cairo and Egypt for the last one hundred years, and is hailed as one of the leading academic institutions in the Middle East. AUC’s alumni have included diplomats, business leaders, statesmen and stateswomen, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists, media personalities, filmmakers, revolutionaries, and even a queen. In that time, the university has experienced wars, revolutions, attempted nationalization, bombings, and, in recent times, a wholesale move to a new purpose-built campus in the desert. Utilizing a rich array of photographs, documents, and objects, this book presents one hundred short stories about the life and legacy of this unique and remarkable institution.

To read an excerpt, click here.

For the Table of Contents, click here.