In a Time of Monsters

May 15, 2019
Sky, a Briton and currently a senior fellow at Yale, has spent the bulk of her career in the Middle East, including serving as a political adviser to the former top U.S. general in Iraq, Ray Odierno. She recorded some of her experiences in The Unravelling (2015). She now continues her story, beginning with her return home from Iraq in 2010 and her subsequent struggle with culture shock. The following year, she set out to study the Arab Spring, visiting and writing about Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and more, always trying to better understand places enveloped in turmoil and the people there as they struggled with sometimes-clueless Western interventions. Sky has friends everywhere and her patient queries evoke valuable insights into the unique sources of regional discontent. Her despair at the Assad regime in Syria and the West's predictable but devastating response to the refugee crisis is palpable, as is her resolve to serve as witness and recorder of the burning world. Sky writes like a novelist, making this ideal recommendation for foreign-affairs-related book clubs hard to set down.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)