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The Other Side of the Mirror: An American's Travels Through Syria
The Other Side of the Mirror An American's Travels Through Syria Author:Brooke Allen When Brooke Allen first visited Syria in early 2009, she expected it to be much as American news media routinely depicted it: an ultra-conservative Muslim society, a police state ruled by an aura of fear, a rogue state committed to anti-Americanism and resistance to Israel. Instead she found the most captivating country she had ever visited and ... more »certainly the most welcoming, a place rich in the gentleness and courtesy that disappeared from Western culture decades ago.Allen soon returned for a leisurely trip through Syria's incomparable historical and archaeological treasures: the ancient cities of Aleppo and Damascus, the great Crusader castles, the Bronze Age ruins of Ebla and Mari, the Greco-Roman cities of Palmyra and Apamea. The Other Side of the Mirror describes this journey and the people she met along the way. It illustrates one traveler's enlightenment while reflecting on our American ways. For, as Allen writes, "To visit a place like Syria is to realize that all the international news we read or see, from whatever point on the political spectrum, serves not as a window looking out at the world but as a mirror, one that reflects our own neuroses and obsessions back at us."Brooke Allen's critical writings appear frequently in The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, and The Nation. Her Twentieth-Century Attitudes was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her most recent book is Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.« less