All Quiet on the Eastern Front

EARLIER this year, a friend of mine, en route from Jordan to Syria, waited nervously as Syrian border guards searched his cab and luggage for forbidden materials. Not all that thoroughly, it turns out. In the trunk of the cab, carefully hidden in a suitcase, was a copy of a book my friend intended to deliver to a resident of Damascus. As an extra precaution, he had slipped the book into a misleading jacket—appropriately, Andrei Codrescu’s Disappearance of the Outside, which includes an essay on dissident Eastern European writers.

Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World, by Kanan Makiya (Norton, 367 pp., $22.95)

GS

About the Author

George Shadroui

EARLIER this year, a friend of mine, en route from Jordan to Syria, waited nervously as Syrian border guards searched his cab and luggage for forbidden materials. Not all that thoroughly, it turns out. In the trunk of the cab, carefully hidden in a suitcase, was a copy of a book my friend intended to deliver to a resident of Damascus. As an extra precaution, he had slipped the book into a misleading jacket—appropriately, Andrei Codrescu’s Disappearance of the Outside, which includes an essay on dissident Eastern European writers.

Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World, by Kanan Makiya (Norton, 367 pp., $22.95)