This is a brisk, refreshing book that helps all of us look at the Middle East in a different way. There are many points at which, it can be claimed, the modern Middle East was formed. One obvious candidate is 1967, the date of the third Arab–Israeli war, and of the effective demise of the conflict between Arab radical nationalist and conservative forces. Another turning point would be 1991, the year of the last Gulf War and of the collapse of the USSR. An earlier conventional starting point for the history of the modern Middle East is 1918, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the states system that has, more or less, endured to this day. David Lesch, a historian working at Trinity University in San Antonio, takes 1979. In his view, there are three major, somewhat inter-related, events that together marked this as being the decisive moment for the ensuing decades: the Iranian Revolution in February, the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty in March, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.