Description: There is no greater historian of the middle east than Bernard Lewis. This symphony of voices, full of wit and wisdom, deception and invention, spite and wonder is ordered and explained by our foremost authority on the middle east. Lewis provides freestanding introductions and explanatory material where needed to chapters on Government and War, Commerce and Trafficking, Travelers, Diplomats, Women, Arts and Sciences, Wit and Wisdom and Prophecy and Retrospect.

In times of war and in peace, from the earliest days of the Roman Empire to our own, Westerners have journeyed to the lands of the middle east bringing back accounts of their impressions and experiences. From the first Arab embassy to the Vikings in the 9th century to the internet musings of the Taliban in our own, A Middle East Mosaic collects a rich, boisterous literature of cultural exchange.

We see the American Revolution through the eyes of a Moroccan Ambassador and the French Revolution through a series of Imperial Ottoman proclamations. We find surprising portraits of Napoleon ("a brigand chief") and Queen Victoria, Talleyrand and Hitler. We learn what Florence Nightingale and Machiavelli thought of Turkish polity and Flaubert and Thackeray of eastern retribution; we peer into Voltaire's business correspondence and follow in the footsteps of Mark Twain, Melville and Ibn Battutta, the Marco Polo of the east, as he first encounters a 4 wheel cart. Other great discoveries are recorded -- an Egyptian ambassador is introduced to electricity and dismisses the spectacle as "Frankish trickery; " another pronounces the invention of a secure mail system most useful for assignations. We enter the harem with a 15th-century physicianand emerge with Ottoman reform.

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