Ray Stickle

And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East by Richard Engel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A solid mix of historical context and on-the-ground narrative. I've read a few books on the modern Middle East, but this is by far the best. He does an excellent job of spelling out the myriad reasons why the region is a mess, sharing a history stretching from the Crusades to the Wahhabi to the indiscriminate carving up of lands after WWI to the Iraq War and the Arab Spring. Though don't think you're buying a solely historical account. At some points it's a travel book--the charms of the marketplace, the antiquities of Egypt, the dusty apartments. Mainly, though, it's the story of a journalist who's worked non-stop in the region since 1996, there from the height of the "big men" to the current chaos. Shot at, nearly bombed, kidnapped. Bearing witness to the atrocities like so many great journalists before him have (William Shirer kept coming to mind since I recently read his Berlin Diary). I cannot recommend this book enough--for the understanding you'll get of events central to our world, and for the addictive narrative that keeps you turning the pages.

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Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41 by William L. Shirer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A wealth of information from a talented writer. From the Nuremberg rallies to the Nazi invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland and France to midnight bombings in Berlin to the slowly unfolding story of the murder of the disabled, with brief respites with his wife and daughter (born in the madness in Vienna), Shirer battles censors and shrapnel, dicey flights and rationing, blacked-out streets and bomb craters, all to get the story of Nazi Germany back to the U.S. All of it ends with Shirer onboard a ship, watching Europe fade away: "For a time I stood against the rail watching the lights recede on a Europe in which I had spent all fifteen of my adult years, which had given me all of my experience and what little knowledge I had. It had been a long time, but they had been happy years, personally, and for all people in Europe they had meaning and borne hope until the war came and the Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murder and the massacre and the incredible intolerance and all the suffering and the starving and cold and the thud of a bomb blowing the people in a house to pieces, the thud of all the bombs blasting man's hope and decency." God, it's frightening what the Nazis did, the world they envisioned. Thanks to William Shirer for being brave enough to tell the story.

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