• Introduction
• The road to Madrid
• Blessed are the peacemakers
• The rise of Bill Clinton
• Syria's honeymoon with Clinton's America
• The deposit that never was
• Rabin's assassination and the long road to nowhere
• The legacy of Yusuf al-Azma
• The April understanding
• The not-so-secret Lauder talks
• The Shepherdstown debacle
• The man who did not sign
• Epilogue.

Bouthaina Shaaban worked closely with Syria's President Hafez al-Assad from 1990 until the time of his death, serving as both official interpreter and adviser. Her new book, part memoir and part historical account, takes the reader behind the closed doors of the Syrian Presidential Palace to provide uniquely Syrian perceptions of the failed Arab-Israel peace talks. Sharing firsthand stories of relationships (her own and Assad's) with members of the Bush and Clinton administrations, and drawing on previously unavailable minutes and other documents from the Syrian presidential archives, Shabaan takes us from the early Syrian-US engagement in 1990-1991 to the three Assad-Clinton summits in 1994-2000. In the process, she includes intriguing revelations about the Rabin Deposit, the April Understanding on Lebanon, and the 1998 Track II effort with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Bouthaina Shaaban offers the first account of these negotiations to come from a Syrian insider-an essential contribution to our understanding of the enduring conflict in the Middle East.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• Marriage, divorce, and the gender division of property
• Working women, single women, and the rise of the female ribat
• The monetization of marriage
• Divorce, repudiation, and settlement
• Repudiation and public power
• Conclusion.

High rates of divorce, often taken to be a modern and western phenomenon, were also typical of medieval Islamic societies. By pitting these high rates of divorce against the Islamic ideal of marriage, Yossef Rapoport radically challenges usual assumptions about the legal inferiority of Muslim women and their economic dependence on men. He argues that marriages in late medieval Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem had little in common with the patriarchal models advocated by jurists and moralists. The transmission of dowries, women's access to waged labour, and the strict separation of property between spouses made divorce easy and normative, initiated by wives as often as by their husbands. This carefully researched work of social history is interwoven with intimate accounts of individual medieval lives, making for a truly compelling read. It will be of interest to scholars of all disciplines concerned with the history of women and gender in Islam.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The chosen sect
• Madness and methodology
• Musa cerantonio
• Yahya the American
• A dream deferred
• Dissent
• The war of the end of time
• Afterlife.

"The Way of the Strangers is an intimate journey into the minds of the Islamic State's true believers. From the streets of Cairo to the mosques of London, Wood interviews supporters, recruiters, and sympathizers of the group...Wood speaks with non-Islamic State Muslim scholars and jihadists, and explores the group's idiosyncratic, coherent approach to Islam...Through character study and analysis, Wood provides a clear-eyed look at a movement that has inspired so many people to abandon or uproot their families.