Books in Brief: Nasser

Nasser, by Robert Stephens (Simon & Schuster, 631 pp., $12.50). Because American interest in the Mideast is recent in origin and passionate in content, most books written by Americans about the Mideast are both superficial and biased. The English and French do better on both counts. Robert Stephens, presently foreign editor of the liberal London Sunday newspaper, the Observer, is acquainted with the Mideast by having lived there as a journalist and by many years of studying its history. His “political biography” of Nasser is rather pedestrian in style, but thorough, well-balanced and vastly informative. Although Nasser was often presented in the American press as an irresponsible fanatic or a Communist stooge, he was in truth the outstanding modern leader not only of the world’s oldest nation but of the early phase of the Arab renaissance, and one of the most important leaders of the global anticolonial revolution. “Nasserism,” with its pragmatic neo-socialism launched by a military elite functioning as a revolutionary vanguard, never became a coherent system in either idea or practice. Nevertheless, many of its features reappear in other developing countries so diverse as Greece, Peru and Nigeria. You can learn much about both Nasser and Nasserism from Mr. Stephens’ solid text, ample quotations, relevant maps, detailed index and extensive bibliography. J. burnham