Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed

Ahdaf Soueif (Get this book)
A deeply personal, engaged tribute by the far-flung Egyptian novelist and journalist as she returned to witness the revolution in her hometown. It has taken the next generation, her children's, to prevail, and Soueif declares gallantly: "We follow them and pledge what's left of our lives to their effort." Early on, the author offers an in-the-moment account of the crucial first days of street action, often messy, confused and involving violent clashes with the police, though undertaken by friends, family and strangers alike with heartwarming camaraderie. Soueif offers both an extraordinary eyewitness document and a sense of the historical import of the revolution.--Kirkus

Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865

James B. Conroy (Get this book)
A brilliant account of the doomed effort to end the Civil War through diplomacy. In February 1865 three "commissioners," all prominent members of the Confederate government, met with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward on a riverboat near Hampton Roads, Va., to explore the possibility of a negotiated end to the Civil War, an event briefly portrayed in the recent film Lincoln. The project appeared hopeless from the start; schemes were launched to derail the conference before it could begin, deftly defeated by further chicanery on the parts of the commissioners and Ulysses Grant. A splendid addition to any Civil War library.--Kirkus

America's Great Game: The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East

Hugh Wilford (Get this book)
By turns admiring and critical play-by-play of CIA Arabists as they directed the Cold War's Middle East chessboard. As the blowback from America's meddling in the Middle East continues to return in the form of the toppling of dictators long supported by Washington, Wilford spotlights the activities of several prominent CIA Arabists who helped manipulate the Cold War regimes in Egypt, Iran, Syria, Jordan and others, often to contradictory and devastating effect. A mostly insightful examination of these "Mad Men on the Nile."--Kirkus