This is an invaluable addition to the debate on how we got to the point we are now in our relations with the Middle East. As the title and the authors suggest, much may have been lost of what progress was gained in the past century. In order to move forward once again, we must look back to the events that underpin today’s Middle East, and pick up where we left off.
Here three voices — that of the renowned author Jean Lacouture, that of Ghassan Tuéni, a former ambassador to the UN, that of historian Gérard Khoury -- gather in an open conversation. The aim is to make as accessible as possible to a broad audience everything that happened over the past one hundred years in the Middle East that we need to know in order to understand what is going on there today. Not a small proposition, but the authors succeed, and the result is an enlightening and whirlwind tour of the Arab world.