A Druze Warlord at the Court of the Medici Fakhr ad-Din Ma'n was a small man with outsize ambitions, and Renaissance Emir tells his story, a unique account of cultural discovery with a tragic end. A Druze prince who fled his mountain to seek refuge in Florence at the end of the Renaissance, he took along a diverse party of Moslem, Christian, and Jewish Levantines on their first visit to the 'Lands of the Christians'. The Medici princes, ... Full description
Only the Dead is part adventure story and part exploration of the moral complexities arising from war, brutality, and the desire for revenge As old Vartan sits reading mystical Persian poetry among the dust and disintegration of war-torn Beirut, the fluted pillars of his decaying house weathered in shadows, his thoughts wander back, inevitably, to another conflict, many years before… Only the Dead is the story of Vartan Nakashian, a young Armenian from Aleppo caught in the midst of a world war that is proving catastrophic for his people. We follow his journey of love, espionage, tragedy, betrayal, and revenge across the tumultuous Levant of 1915-1918, as the crucible of war and genocide makes a man of the boy we first encountered. Now advanced in years, Vartan ruminates on life, loss, guilt, and the many adventures and horrors of his youth, seeing them mirrored in the fresh catastrophe of the Lebanese Civil War. This novel—based in part on a real man, a true story—is about the struggle to reconcile conflicting loyalties and affections, the desire for revenge, the search for atonement, and poetry’s power to make sense of the human condition.
Medieval Andalucia is known as a land of regrets, the place of the Moorish
King's last sigh, where travelers sense the destruction of mosque of Cordoba
and feel emptiness of the Alhambra's domes. This collection of poetry fills
those halls with life, a desire for love and enchantments of wine, laughter,
moonlit picnics, and bare flesh.
Fakhr ad-Din Ma'n was a small man with outsize ambitions, and Renaissance Emir tells his story, a unique account of cultural discovery with a tragic end. A Druze prince who fled his mountain to seek refuge in Florence at the end of the Renaissance, he took along a diverse party of Moslem, Christian, and Jewish Levantines on their first visit to the 'Lands of the Christians'. The Medici princes, their courtiers and the people of Florence were as astonished as their guests, and their mutual act of discovery was recorded in an Arabic memoir written by one of the exiles, and the detailed reports filed in the Medici archives, all newly translated for this book. Fakhr ad-Din tried to convince the Popes and potentates of Europe to join him in a chimerical crusade to push the Ottomans out of the Levant, eventually returning home to defeat an Ottoman army on the battlefield - a Pyrrhic victory that would lead him and his sons to execution in the presence of the Sultan, thus extinguishing his line. His influence is still seen in certain Italianate buildings, and some groups in fractured Lebanon claim him as 'Father of the Nation'.The story of his life offers the reader a vibrant vignette of life at the intersection of European and Islamic empires, told for the first time in English and based on first-hand archives and other original sources that impart to it a truly exceptional poignancy.
