This study of the Egyptian mountain widely believed to be Mount Sinai examines its geographical features, sacred sites, and the effects of rising tourism. Amid the high mountains of Egypt's southern Sinai Peninsula stands Jebel Musa, “Mount Moses,” which many Christians and Muslims revere as Mount Sinai. In this fascinating study, Joseph Hobbs draws on geography and archaeology, Biblical and Quranic accounts, and a wide array of personal experiences—from Christian monks to Bedouin shepherds, medieval Europeans, and casual tourists—to explore why this mountain came to be considered a sacred place. He also shows how that very perception now threatens its fragile ecology and inspiring solitude. After discussing the physical and geographic characteristics of Jebel Musa that suggest it as the most probable Mount Sinai, Hobbs fully describes all Christian and Muslim sacred sites around the mountain. He also views Mount Sinai from the perspectives of the Jabaliya Bedouins and the monks of the St. Katherine Monastery, both of whom have inhabited in the region for centuries. Hobbs concludes his account with the international debate over whether to build a cable car on Mount Sinai and with an unflinching description of the negative impact of tourism on the delicate desert environment. His book raises important, troubling questions for everyone concerned about the fate of the earth's wild and sacred places.
Emotional Cities offers an innovative account of the history of cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Analyzing debates about emotions and urban change, it questions the assumed dissimilarity of the history of European and Middle Eastern cities during this period. The author shows that between 1860 and 1910, contemporaries in both Berlin and Cairo began to negotiate the transformation of the urban realm in terms of emotions. Looking at the ways in which a variety of urban dwellers, from psychologists to bar maids, framed recent changes in terms of their effect on love, honor, or disgust, the book reveals striking parallels between the histories of the two cities. By combining urban history and the history of emotions, Prestel proposes a new perspective on the emergence of different, yet comparable cities at the end of the nineteenth century.
Eight years ago, Robbie Stallings, an eleven-year old Asperger child, was abducted by an unidentified assailant while riding his bicycle home with his brothers along a stretch of deserted road near his home in Dickenson, North Dakota. His mother, claiming to have a psychic link with the boy, seeks the help of Rick Mallory, a high profile detective whose exploits have been sensationalized in the New York Herald Gazette by the famous crime reporter Moe Berg. Mallory takes the case, but where does he start to look for clues eight years after the fact? He retains a vague recollection of the young reporter who covered the case on television. It was none other than Melissa Compton, the anchor of the top-rated television news magazine Tunnel Vision. The book opens with Mallory visiting her at 30 Rock. The sexual tension between the protagonists is craftily woven into a mystery that leads them across the country, from New York to Montana, and ultimately into each other's arms.
The Black Squares Club is a gripping psycho-sexual detective novel written for the mature reader. It is the second novel of the Sam Sonn series, built on the personna of a hi-tech sleuth who undertakes high profile cases. This time, a serial killer taunts both the police and his victims by mailing in crosswords that give clues to the time and place of his next murder. Sonn attempts to unmask the killer by applying his knowledge of crosswords, his background in computer science as well as his uncanny ability to decipher the criminal mind. In order to solve this case, however, he must sacrifice what he deems most precious--the only woman he ever truly loved. The author spins a chilling narrative that traps the readers psyche in unsuspecting twists, intellectual challenges, passionate sexual encounters and chilling violence. This is escapism in its purest form, transporting the reader to a place from which he may never return. Reader discretion is advised.
In the Semitic languages the vowels are not part of the alphabet and each Semitic language has its special method of marking its particular vowel values. In the Hebrew of Late Antiquity, a supralinear method of doing this was first introduced after the Arabic conquest of Palestine in the seventh century. It was used mainly for liturgical purposes in complicated poetic texts, and it was soon displaced by the classical Tiberian system. The oldest existing specimens of this supralinear method are on vellum manuscripts from Cairo where the remaining fragments were deposited by Jewish refugees from Crusader Palestine at the end of the eleventh century. The fragments from the Cairo depository, known as the Cairo Genizah, are best represented in the Genizah Collections at Cambridge University Library. This volume gives for the first time a full description of the scattered and torn fragments, as well as of their notational value.
As the Arab states come to grips with new realities in the Middle East - the shifts in political and economic power in the region, the growing ascendency of fundamentalist Islam over Nationalist and pan-Arab ideologies of the past and the changing dynamics of the Palestinian problem - the course that Mubarak charts for Egypt has become a factor of key importance. In this book, a career Foreign Service officer examines the changes that are taking place in Egyptian attitudes and policies toward the Arab world from three perspectives - the ways in which Egypt pursued its regional interests under Nasser and Sadat, the policy constraints imposed by political, economic and social forces within Egypt, and the dynamics of Egyptian-Arab relations since the October War.
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