Buy used: $3.25

$8.39 delivery August 8 - 23. Details

Used: Like New | Details

Sold by bellwetherbooks

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Add to List

Added to

Unable to add item to List. Please try again.

Share <Embed>

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Author

Stephen Starr

Revolt in Syria: Eye-witness to the Uprising (Columbia/Hurst) Paperback – August 14, 2012

by Stephen Starr (Author)

11 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$7.76

—

Paperback

"Please retry"

$22.76

$13.51

$1.33

Paperback, August 14, 2012

$3.25

$19.25

$1.12

Mass Market Paperback

"Please retry"

$73.50

$35.22

In January of 2011, President Bashar al-Assad officially declared Syrian society stable and the government immune to revolt. In the months that followed, and as regimes fell in Egypt and Tunisia, thousands of ordinary Syrians took to the streets calling for an end to Assad's regime. Many have been killed by the bullets of the president's army.

In Revolt in Syria, Stephen Starr delves deep into the lives of those affected by the Syrian state over the past five decades. Interviewing people from all levels of society, he gathers and interprets the varied views and beliefs that show why Syria, with its numerous sects and religious diversity, has been so prone to violence and civil instability. Gaining unique access to a country largely cut off from the international media, Starr delivers compelling firsthand testimony from those who have suffered and from those who benefited most from the regime. Revolt in Syria reveals why many Syrians wanted Assad's government to stay intact as an alternative to endless civil war. It measures the long-standing gap between the state apparatus and its people and explains what led Syria's youth to finally stand up and call decisively for freedom. Starr also outlines the positions of the country's minorities and describes why many Syrians believe enforced regime change will only lead to region-wide conflict.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Columbia University Press
Publication date

August 14, 2012
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

0231704208
ISBN-13

978-0231704205
See all details

Editorial Reviews

Review

Stephen Starr explores Syria's religious and class divisions with a keen eye for personal anecdote and broad truths. He gets below the surface of this country where people often speak in half-truths and use misdirection as the first line of defense, and he knows the corruption and immobility of Syria's state institutions, but also understands why so many Syrians cling to these same institutions for stability and jobs in a region troubled by so many failed states. Starr is a deft guide to Syria in the midst of revolution. A must-read.

(Joshua M. Landis, director, Center for Middle East Studies, University of Oklahoma)

Stephen Starr's four-year stay in Syria as a sharp-eyed freelance journalist has given him unusual assets -- an uncommon knowledge of daily life in Damascus; an understanding of the ills of Syrian society; an extensive network of friends from different communities; and sympathetic insight into divided loyalties as the country slides ever closer to civil war.

(Patrick Seale, author of The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East)

Revolt in Syria is far more than a simple focus on the clash between the regime and the protestors. It explores, from a non-academic perspective, the fundamental debates that define modern Syria, from dichotomies of state and society, urban and rural, rich and poor, ethnicity and sectarianism which all contribute towards an overall narrative of suppressed discontent which is essential for understanding what fuelled anger in the first place.... An important contribution to this hugely stifled subject.

(James Denselow, Huffington Post UK)

Written with insight and verve, this book is essential reading for anybody interested in Syria.

(Fergal Keane, BBC journalist and author of Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944)

The book is an important contribution to the hugely stifled subject of Syria...

(Huffington Post)

Stephen Starr has written an extraordinary account of the uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.... [An] impressive and insightful eye-witness account.

(Vincent Durac Irish Times)

Starr's book is not only an important contribution to the uprising, but also a sometimes terrifying account of the Syrian police state.

(Tam Hussein New Statesman)

Essential reading.

(Lauren Williams The Daily Star)

Review

Powerful and important. This searching inquiry is painful reading, but urgent for those who hope to understand what lies behind the shocking events in Syria, what the prospects might be, and what outsiders can -- and cannot -- do to mitigate the immense suffering as a country so rich in history and promise careens towards disaster.

(Noam Chomsky)

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Columbia University Press (August 14, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0231704208
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0231704205
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches

Customer Reviews:
11 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Stephen Starr

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Stephen Starr is a journalist and author who lived in Damascus, and elsewhere in Syria, from 2007 to 2012. From the Syrian capital he began working first as an editor at Syria Times and then as a freelance reporter.

Until February 2012 he reported Syria’s popular uprising from inside the country and has written the critically acclaimed ‘Revolt in Syria: Eye-Witness to the Uprising‘ about events there. He has also reported from Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Canada and Ireland.

Stephen’s writings have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Irish Times, USA Today, Global Post, The Times, The Globe & Mail, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post and The Sunday Times, and he has contributed to WNYC, CBC, BBC, CNN, Fox News, Sky News and Al Jazeera television, among many others.

From September 2012 to April 2013 he was a Munk School fellow in global journalism at the University of Toronto and wrote for the National Post and the Globe and Mail. At the latter he launched the Syria Live blog.

He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Near East Quarterly.

Customer reviews

5 star		43%
4 star		24%
3 star		20%
2 star		7%
1 star		7%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

James R. Maclean

Frustrating but unique

Reviewed in the United States on December 25, 2013

(The author of this review has never visited Syria. What follows is a book review, not a discussion of events in Syria.)

A survey of books published on the Syrian Revolt of 2011 is disappointing: nearly all of them (this excepted) are summaries of widely available news reports on Syria (1). This one and Mr. Wieland's (see footnote) consist mainly of the authors' personal observations in Syria. Starr's account is almost a diary, while Wieland's is organized like an area handbook.

Starr's book urgently needs an editor. The writing is at times difficult to follow, as if he had stitched together many rough drafts, without being able to remember what he had explained to readers. Crucial backstory is often missing or misrepresented (2). Whenever summarizing relevant historical events, Starr crumples the chronology:

[QUOTE]

When the Baath (Renaissance) Party took control of Syria in 1963, followed by an internal military coup led by Hafez al-Assad in 1970, Arab nationist sentiment was elevated to the extent that Kurds were sidelined. In 1962, an 'exceptional census' stripped some 120,000 Kurds of the Syrian citizenship. [...] An alliance established by Hafez al-Assad in the 1970s broke down in in 2004 when an uprising followed a football game in the remnants of the Damascus Spring of 2000-01, the 2004 Kurdish revolt serving to embolden the Kurds [...] (p.35)

[ENDQUOTE]

However, there are so many books about the history of Assad in Syria, or Syria in general, that most readers will not care about this. Most readers will want a feel for Syrian society drawn from Starr's interviews or observations.

Here, Starr excels. Often his writing is vivid and evocative, if hopeless in its pursuit of a conclusion. He does capture a lot of nuance in the complicated relationships of different segments of Syrian society: the Baathist epoch has utterly transformed the country, spawning a host of 2nd-order effects.

But Starr's own personality gets in the way a lot, too. He argues and hectors interview subjects; he dwells a lot on observations that are frankly noise. For example, it turns out that Syrians no less than US nationals, when asked a question about public issues, typically say several incompatible things--like, we need a theocracy to be free, or the like. This is not meaningful, especially if one is exposed to political arguments in a lot of different countries (it's not just countries in dire crisis where people say deranged things). In the first part of the book he records not only his questions, but his pronouncements to Syrians--no doubt stunned at a journalist lecturing them. For example, he rails to ordinary civilians about their preferences:

[QUOTE]

[LEILA:]"The last thing we need is for NATO or America or Turkey to come and help us. This will destroy the country and I know that if they come it will only be for their own interests [...] I do not want freedom if it is free"

[...]

"[STARR:]So how many people must die for you to get what you want? Is it not wrong that people are dying every day?" I asked. (p.119)

[ENDQUOTE]

This is not intended as a real question, however tactless. And Starr does this constantly. After one particular observation, he suddenly becomes convinced the regime will fall; before, he has been impatient with people who want the regime to fall, and afterward, he is doubly impatient with people who fear the consequences of it falling.

The description of society or how Syrians/Syrian institutions behave in common situations is handy, if random (because he's simply generalizing from his personal experiences.) So this book falls into the category of one Westerner's testimony of the early phase of the Revolution, just as it transitioned into a guerrilla war. Starr's own personal expectations and preferences muddy the waters, and it is often quite difficult to decide what point he's trying to make, but not many other outsiders have recorded their experiences in such detail.
__________________________________________________
(1) For up-to-date information, I've relied mostly on Joshua Landis's blog, Syria Comment. One very good companion to this work, in my opinion, is Carsten Wieland's Syria - A Decade of Lost Chances: Repression and Revolution from Damascus Spring to Arab Spring (released 1 March 2012). Starr's book was released 23 weeks later, in August. Starr was a freelance journalist from Ireland, while Wieland was a diplomat from Germany.

(2) In addition to the turgid syntax of the quoted passage, Starr makes occasional jabs at the Baath Party's socialist past. I'm not sure if this just hippie-punching, or Marx-kicking (see my review for the The Morality of Money ), or if Starr genuinely feels let down by the Baath Party's one-time socialist credentials, but characterizing the Baathist as "socialist" is a little like calling F. von Hayek a "liberal," and then taking this to mean he was just like Senator George McGovern. In a like manner, nearly all political activists in the developing world self-identified as "socialist" for many years; in some cases, such as early Baathists Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar (founders of the Baath Party) or Gamal Abdul Nasser (1958-1962, President of the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria), this meant scarcely more than a developmentalist agenda and a commitment to "reform" traditional social institutions.

After 1962, Aflaq and Bitar resumed their control over Syrian politics; in 1966, a bloody coup replaced them with Saleh Jadid, who really did attempt to implement a hardline quasi-Leninist regime in Syria. After 1968-ish, this mainly consisted of terrible foreign relations--war, or veritable war, with Israel, Jordan, and the West (Edward Luttwak, in Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook , argues that Jadid was compelled to affect "socialism" because it afforded a manageable state structure, considering the sectarian and class structure of Syria). Assad's 1970 coup explicitly replaced a "socialist" dictatorship with a "nationist" one. This is not ironic, nor does it say anything about leftwing politics. The right beat the left in Syria after an open fight between military factions.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Declan Hayes

Like him they are simple hulks

Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2014

I give this two stars, not so much because of Mr Starr but because of how I feel he is being used by those who wish to smash Syrian and install a Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship, fronted through the Free Syrian Army or some similar gang of mercenaries.
I say that as Mary Fitzgerald and other die-hard supporters of Syrian and Libyan murder gangs have wheeled Starr and others out for their own reasons of pretending that their side of events in Syria and in Libya is the correct one. Events have shown that the mercenaries they supported have been thieving, throat-cutting thugs and, as such they can have no credibility. In this regard, you will notice I am posting on an older version of the book whereas others can post on a 2015 edition.
What of the book itself? Well, I have visited Damascus and Syria three times this year and my experiences were not his. I have met and seen members of the Shabiha, the Syrian Army, Syrian politicians and most of all Syrian civilians. The Shabiha types I met are not my type and many ordinary Syrians are scared of them so that is not an issue. The ones I met were too fond of steroids and they are physically off putting as they strike too much of a resemblance to Brutus, Popeye’s nemesis. Like him they are simple hulks, good perhaps for breaking prisoners in two or being heavies in extortion rackets but not much else. Some of those I met showed me the knife wounds and rope marks they had as souvenirs of assassination attempts they survived so they too have a story.
Importantly, they are, if you like, the New Shabiha as many of the Old Shabiha and the Ba’ath party are at the front, putting their lives on the line for $40 a month, which is roughly a third of what you can earn in a day if you join the mercenaries of the Free Syrian Army.
Starr tells us of the resentment a lot of Syrians felt towards their government. Well, if you were on $40 a day, so might you. And that is if you had a job. At the moment, jobs are as scarce in Syria as are white blackbirds. This is a side product of the war of attrition being waged by Turkish and Saudi mercenaries with the help of US led sanctions on secular Syria.
He tells us of his experiences and that of other journalists, including those working for the pro Muslim Brotherhood Al Jazeera network. They complain about the secret police watching them. With me, the authorities were more worried about so-called moderate rebels snatching me. They were overly protective and, as such, a symptom of the static society from whence they came.
This is an important point. There was no Syrian spring but a foreign-imposed uprising that used the grievances of the Syrian people to destroy the country. The rebels are a mixture of amoral Syrian mercenaries who prefer $150 a day to $40 a month, Syrian expatriate Muslim Brotherhood opportunists who fancy themselves as future leaders of an American-controlled Syrian client state and the fanatics of al Nusra and ISIS who were the muscle of Saudi and Turkish foreign policy and who are paid in cash and in looted booty for bringing mayhem to Syria.
But what of the democrats, you say. Quite simply there are none or none of consequence at least. The roots of domestic dissent can be found in the embittered families of the Muslim Brotherhood and in groups such as the Turkmen who supply most of the local jihadists. There is no great democratic tradition for others to draw from. Sure, the proponents of democracy, equality and fraternity Starr met had their moments in the sun in the early days but the bombs, bullets and targeted assassinations of the Free Syrian Army soon put paid to them. They are less than a fig-leaf now on what is a brutal war of attrition against the Syrian people.
I was in the heart of Homs for the Presidential election, in areas destroyed by the Syrian air force and the Syrian Arab Army. Yet all of the conservative Sunni Muslims came out of their own volition and voted for Assad. Why? Because he is a war President and they want this war won and the extremist rebels who used them as slaves defeated.
Will there be reform? Quite possibly there will be if Syria survives and if the American cure does not turn it into another Iraq or Libya. The solution is in dialogue, not in exterminating Kurds, Alawites and Armenians for the greater good of Erdogan’s Turkey.
What has all this to do with this book? Quite a lot. Starr cobbled this book hurriedly together when the Troubles began and, like me, he repeats himself a lot, in this edition at least, to pad it out; unlike the other reviewers, I am not privy to the 2015 edition as it is only 2014 in my time zone. Yet we must look forward to 2015 and not always backwards.
His 2015 edition might be a big improvement if he condenses all of this into one small chapter, adds some background information and lots more new material. But there is the rub. I doubt he will get a visa to enter Syria legally in the near future and so will have to take the road rebel apologists like Mary Fitzgerald of the Irish Times took. On the positive side, because he broadly supports the rebels rather than the Syrian people, the Irish Times should carry his pieces. This is unlike Finian Cunningham who reported on Saudi abuses in Bahrain and was blacklisted by the Irish Times as a result. Liberty comes with a price. That price is high for the Syrian people and for the Syrian Arab Army who will, please God, deliver that freedom from foreign serfdom to the Syrian people.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

ilokings

Very good book for students who study international relations or politics

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 17, 2013

Verified Purchase

This is a very interesting book, written in a way that even if English is not your first language, it is easy to understand. Always again! I am completely happy with the product and the way it was delivered.

Safety Catch

Excellent account

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 29, 2015

Verified Purchase

Excellent account of the build up to and beginnings of the revolution in Syria which led to the current chaos and catastrophe.

marlene

Eye opening

Reviewed in Canada on April 12, 2016

Verified Purchase

Thank you for being so descriptive and brave to write this book. It is hard to read but the situation is also very complicated. God bless the people who want peace and democracy .

Period Drama Fan

Easy read

Reviewed in Canada on July 29, 2012

Verified Purchase

I found this book of great interest after having lived in Syria for 3 years.It filled in many of the gaps in my own knowledge and often validated thoughts that I was not able to discuss with locals before.
It makes sense of what is happening there now and also what was happening in the lead up to today.it is a very easy read for anyone not at all the heay read i was expecting. The writer has a leaning to one side of the story even though it is trying to remain factual.

Period Drama Fan

Interesting read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 16, 2012

Verified Purchase

Very interesting book to read regarding the build up to the existing war . Very easy to read and for those of you who have lived in the area is quite intriguing. It enlightened me to what was happening whilst I was living there and made sense to many of the things I saw and experienced. I have bought this book for 2 friends so would recommend this as one view of the present crisis from a foreign journalist who was living there.

See all reviews

Sorry, there was a problem.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Follow the Author

Revolt in Syria: Eye-witness to the Uprising (Columbia/Hurst) Paperback – August 14, 2012

Editorial Reviews

Review

Review

About the Author

Product details

Videos

About the author

Stephen Starr

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries