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Title: The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria
ISBN: 0300109911
Author:
David W. Lesch
Publicate Date: 2005-11-11
Publish: 2005-11-11
List Price: $35.00
Average Customer Rating: 2.5
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $13.94
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $12.45
Amazon Merchant Price: $27.30
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| Customer Review: |
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1: THE NEW LION OF DAMASCUS
David Lesch's access to the President of Syria is critical for this little understood country. This is a fine account and a must read for those who need to know more about this strategic country in the Middle East.
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2: Timely
A well researched and very informative book about Syria and it's new president. Syria is a strategic country in a very important part of the world. Mr.Lesch shed a bright light into that corner of the world
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3: Worshipping Assad
I am still taken aback and quite frankly a little confused by the lengths that Prof. Lesch goes to in order to defend the Assad regime. Every description of some horrible event is followed up by a lengthy rationalization complete with a plethora of quotes from regime figures. I would expect there to be analysis, but every "analysis" following some act or trait describing the Syrian political culture in a way that most of the world would find repugnant is followed up some explanation that favors the regime. What confuses me is how a professor from a US social sciences department can write something that would appear to have come out of Pravda. I mean when he ought to be striving for the ideal of objectivity, he appears to be striving to become part of the inner circle.
I keep picking the book back up again, due to my compulsion to finish a book that I have started, only to put it down again after becoming disturbed by his complete lack of scholarly integrity. I would simply blow it off and skip the regime quotes for the geopolitical sections, but I am just to distracted by this who you know bias thing. I honestly don't your run of the mill cult of personality.
If you still don't believe that Lesch could be a Baathist, let me tell you that I bought the book at a book fair in front of the Assad library of Damascus back in September.
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4: An apologetic praise of the Syrian regime
As in Seale and other Western intellectuals who take off to Syria to write a book there, the generosity and good treatment of the regime toward these people make them fall in love with the regime. You can tell from the very first page when Lesch was very much impressed when Assad replied to his emails.
Needless to say, I couldn't finish this book due to the enormous amount of praise that Lesch hails on the young Syrian president, the Damascus Lion. All that is good in Syria came from Assad and all that is evil came from Syria's enemies in the West. According to this book, the good-willed, kind-hearted Assad is sincerely planning to modernize and democratize Syria, had it not been for the Western anti-Syrian conspiracies that have so far thwarted all such attempts. What an analysis.
Also like the reviewer EDowson (MD) wrote here before me, there is no information about Syria. Perhaps if the author had access to some numbers, like the percentage of people living in poverty while Assad and his group enjoy accumulating enormous wealth, or the number of years anti-Assad opposition figures have spent in the prisons of the Syrian regime, perhaps then Lesch would have changed his opinion a bit. Most important of all, when Lesch writes about the lack of democracy and the nature of the tyrannical regime in Damascus, he does so without even blinking. As if Syria is destined to live under dictatorship and that the dictator himself should be given the chance to renounce his unlimited powers and initiate change. Don't buy this book!
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5: Jibes with reality
I met Syrians of all walks of life when I visited the country earlier this year, and while I learned something from all of them I was especially appreciative of the few who were brave enough to give me a candid assessment of the regime there.
This book fits with what I saw and heard, and has filled in many of the blanks in my understanding of the country. If you really want to understand Syria I suggest you get on a plane and go there. If you can't do that this book is a good second choice.
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