The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon's Life Struggle »

NOT SINCE THOMAS FRIEDMAN’SFROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM IN 1989 HAS A JOURNALIST OFFERED SUCH A POIGNANT AND PASSIONATE PORTRAIT OF LEBANON—A UNIQUELY PLURALIST ARAB COUNTRY STRUGGLING TO DEFEND ITS VIABILITY IN A TURBULENT AND TREACHEROUS MIDDLE EAST.Michael Young, who was taken to Lebanon at age seven by his Lebanese mother after the death of his American father and who has worked most of his career as a journalist there for American publications, brings to life a country in the crossfire of invasions, war, domestic division, incessant sectarian scheming, and often living in fear of its neighbors. Young knows or has known many of the players, politicians, writers, and religious leaders.A country riven by domestic tensions that have often resulted in assassinations, under the considerable sway of Hezbollah (in alliance with Iran and Syria), frequently set upon by Israel and Syria, nearly destroyed by civil war, Lebanon remains an exception among Arab countries because it is a place where liberal instincts and tolerance struggle to stay alive.An important and enduring symbol, Lebanon was once the outstanding example of an (almost) democratic society in an inhospitable, dangerous region—a laboratory both for modernity and violence, as a Lebanese intellectual who was later assassinated once put it.Young relates the growing tension between a domineering Syria and a Lebanese opposition in which charismatic leader and politician Rafiq al-Hariri was assassinated and the Independence Intifada—the Cedar Revolution—broke out. His searing account of his country’s confrontation with its domestic and regional demons is one of hope found and possibly lost. In this stunning narrative, Young tells us what might have been his country’s history, and what it may yet be.

The Washington Post - Kai Bird

…a heartfelt defense of his Lebanese countrymen, their patchwork sectarian political system and their paradoxical liberalism. Young defends Lebanon's sectarianism on sociological grounds. Its mosaic of Maronites (his mother's family), Druze, Greek Orthodox and Sunni and Shiite Muslims is the untidy reality. And while he admits that its system can be dysfunctional, his book celebrates the fact that an independent Lebanon has survived the Palestinian-induced chaos, the civil war, numerous Israeli invasions and the Syrian occupation (1976-2005).

Lebanon Time Line

Introduction 1

1 A Voluptuous Vibration 17

2 A Forest of Fathers 59

3 Total War 89

4 Invisible City 123

5 The Crack-Up 153

6 The Crack-Up Continues 185

7 The End of the Beginning 217

8 The Road from Martyrs Square 245

Acknowledgments 255

Notes 259

Index 283