The study of the history of the modern Middle East has reached the state at which scholars now have access to first-rate monographs, such as this one, even about urban centers as modest as Haifa was during the period covered by this book. This is certainly good news, particularly because books such as this one, and May Seikaly's, which covers a subsequent period of Haifa's history, are comprehensive, well written, and thoroughly grounded in local primary sources. We should be grateful in particular to Brill's “Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage” series for publishing this and other monographs covering the local history of different parts of the Ottoman Empire.

In this important book, Laurie Brand asks whether the all-too-brief political openings in the Middle East and North Africa had a positive or a negative impact on women's rights and whether the many Islamist and women's rights groups influenced that impact. She begins with a thoughtful statement describing her background and philosophical orientation vis-à-vis her study (pp. xv–xvi). Many authors of scholarly books find this very difficult to do, but it is helpful for serious readers and should be an expected practice. She also takes care to define her terms. “Women's status” here means women's legal status and women's rights to organize. She prefers to use “conservative forces” for “Islamism” or “Islamic fundamentalism,” though this varies in the text, and “conservative” for “traditional.” “Progress for women” means reproductive rights and access to divorce, though, as she notes, many women would ask for clean running water, good educational facilities, decent working conditions, and increased wages before reproductive rights and access to divorce. It is of course difficult to separate civil and political rights from social and economic rights; which comes first is like the chicken and the egg conundrum.

Has the time come for a free-trade agreement (FTA) between Egypt and the United States? According to the contributors to Building Bridges, an FTA is the logical next step in the Egypt–U.S. relationship. This policy-oriented volume explores the conditions under which the benefits of an FTA between the parties would be maximized. Although the contributors reach different conclusions regarding the optimal form of the Egypt–U.S. FTA, consensus is reached on one point: an FTA between Egypt and the United States will produce economic benefits for both nations.

Edgar O'Ballance is a military journalist and historian who has covered more than twenty wars and insurgencies and written more than fifty books or monographs on conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Europe, and Asia. His book is a chronological blow-by-blow account of the Lebanese War (1975–90), including a brief account of the events leading to the breakdown of April 1975 and the events immediately following the conclusion of the war in October 1990. Strangely, the title of the book describes the Lebanese War as having extended until 1992. There is no explanation for this odd dating, although it is clear that the author concluded his research in 1992; the book itself ends its chronological accounting in late 1991.

The Soviet Union's collapse and the end of the Cold War have been accompanied by a declining interest in Marxian-inspired theories of political economy in the study of core–periphery relations. Concepts such as dependency and imperialism have been replaced by market forces and structural adjustment. Similarly, post-modernism's impact has been to erode interest in historical theories, especially those with a teleological bent. Thus, Robert Tignor's study, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire, is refreshing in raising issues that have not been central to the recent intellectual agenda in the study of non-Western societies.

Among Middle Eastern and North African states, Libya has been under-studied, especially in recent years, because of difficulties in doing fieldwork and because of Libya's isolation by the American-led international boycott in the wake of the Lockerbie incident. Vandewalle's book is not only a much needed and fresh look at the inner workings of Libya; it is also a very valuable contribution to an ongoing theoretical debate over rentier states, state-building, and étatism. It is the culmination of fourteen months of fieldwork that included interviews with many high officials and access to primary source material available only in Libya.

David Waldner's book is a rigorously argued and impressively sustained account of the relationship between state-building and economic growth in four late-developing countries: South Korea, Syria, Taiwan, and Turkey. By systematically and crisply using a comparative method to bring a unified story to these different histories, Waldner demonstrates in a masterly way the benefits of genuine comparative inquiry; contributes to our understanding of the painful results of economic development in the Middle East; and uses Middle Eastern cases to advance our understanding of the complicated and mediated linkage between state formation and economic development. This ambitious book deserves a wide audience.

On page 465, the line “Following a brief reference of the well-known emotional response to the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, the religious response to the Lebanese writers Salah al-Din al-Munajjid and Kamal Yusuf al-Hajj to the Arab defeat, Rejwan proceeds to a study …” should read “Following a brief reference to the well-known emotional response of the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, the religious response of the Lebanese writers Salah al-Din al-Munajjid and Kamal Yusuf al-Hajj to the Arab defeat, Rejwan proceeds to a study …”