Customer Reviews

Syria: Neither Bread nor Freedom

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Misleading title

Alan George's Syria Neither Bread nor Freedom has a misleading title. When I first bought this book I thought it would be a description of the genesis and evolution of the Baath Party and the Syrian dictatorship that ultimately led to poverty and suppression of human rights.
Instead, the book talks about a brief period when the current Syrian President Bashar Assad succeeded his father Hafez in 2000. The period witnessed a surge in Syrian hopes that their young president had intentions to modernize the regime and the state and allow more freedom, only to discover later that Hazfez Assad's old guard heavy weights cracked heavily on the few figures who dared criticize the regime and call for its modernization.
The author is clearly informed about this civil movement and its leaders, yet his description of these people is sometimes misleading as he tends to depict them as freedom lovers whereas in fact, many of the Syrian "civil insurgents" are just nationalists who think that the regime has failed in winning regional Arab battles and would love to see a stronger one replace it.
This is particularly misleading for Western readers who might confuse these opposition activists for pro-West at the time they are in fact very much anti-West.
The style of the book is "slow and dry," and gets boring at times. The writer should have spiced up his manuscript with figurative description of the Syrian capital and the people whom he interviewed.