This volume hit the bookstore shelves when the film Salkım Hanım's Necklace sparked a great deal of controversy in the Turkish press and drew criticism from ultra-nationalist circles. The film was about the tragedy of the Capital Levy, the most drastic Turkification policy implemented during World War II. It was thanks to the film that younger generations of Turks learned about these events. The debate was further inflamed when the film was shown on state television.

Maziar Behrooz has stated that the goal of his study is twofold: first, to document the history of communism in Iran during the thirty years between the 1953 coup and 1983, “when the last legal communist organizations were banned”; and second, “to provide an analysis of how and why the movement disintegrated in the 1980s.” (p. xv)

The last chapter in Lawrence Davidson's book is titled “Colonizing the American Mind,” with a purpose to reverse the interpretation of Peter Grose's famous book Israel in the American Mind (1983). Actually, the whole of Davidson's book aims to revise the traditional historiographical approach, which has highlighted the strong bond between American values and those of the Jewish state. Davidson has been criticizing this approach since the beginning, focusing his argument on the concept of imperialism, which has produced, according to him, a serious alteration in the West's attitude toward the East. However, as will be shown, the concept of imperialism—based on the traditional separation between a civilized, advanced, and efficient West and an East in need of protection and leadership, which Davidson uses as a basic negative criterion for all his interpretation—is weak, outdated, and, above all, too ideological.

Bankers-turned-historians are not a common sight in our field, and EzzelArab brings his expertise to where it is needed most. His book rightly argues for the significance of financial constraints and economic competition in the development of early nationalism as a reaction to foreign interference in Egyptian affairs before the Urabi revolt. The author predates the notion of economic nationalism, defined as the struggle over the domination of state finances and the economy, to this period rather than to its common association with the establishment of Bank Misr in the early 1920s. Although the term “traditional elites” is somewhat misleading (see later), the book demonstrates that economic nationalism was developed as a response of local power groups to external threats to their interests.

In Green Crescent over Nazareth, Professor Israeli provides a very provocative and meticulous account of Nazareth in modern times—as part of the British Mandatory Palestine and as part of the State of Israel since 1948—and the changing demography of the city, which he characterizes as the hostile and deliberate displacement of Christians by Muslims. The story of Nazareth, and the political and cultural struggle between the Christian and Muslim communities that clearly characterize it, is explained in great detail and is the focus of the book.