MIKHAIL – författare

From Morocco to Iran and the Black Sea to the Red, Water on Sand rewrites the history of the Middle East and North Africa from the Little Ice Age to the Cold War. As the first holistic environmental history of the region over the last half millennium, it shows the intimate connections between peoples and environments and how these relationships shaped political, economic, and social history in startling and unforeseen ways. Nearly all political powers in the region based their rule on the management and control of natural resources, and nearly all individuals were in constant communion with the natural world. To grasp how these multiple histories were central to the pasts of the Middle East and North Africa, the chapters in this book evidence the power of environmental history to open up new avenues of historical research and understanding.Water on Sand furthermore traces how the Middle East and North Africa deeply affected the global histories of climate, disease, trade, energy, environmental politics, ecological manipulation, and much more. Lying at the intersection of three continents and as many seas, the Middle East has obviously been central to world history for millennia. Studying the ecological implications of these global connections, both for the region itself and for the rest of the world, helps to bring the Middle East and North Africa into global history and to show how the region must be an essential part of any understanding of the environments of Eurasia over the last five hundred years.Deeply researched, globally comparative, and highly provocative, Water on Sand represents both a new kind of Middle Eastern history and a new kind of environmental history.

Behan's friends and relatives, and people in his literary circle, have claimed he was not a prolific letter-writer. Even Behan himself has been quoted as saying, "Whoever writes my biography will get no help from my letters. I never write any." But in fact there is a substantial body of letters to and from Behan, who not only corresponded with seventeen periodicals but wrote to relatives, friends, IRA colleagues, civil servants, theatrical directors, publicans, and complete strangers. As in the case of Oscar Wilde, the search for Behan's letters has been hampered by their dispersal to widely scattered and unexpected places. The surviving letters that Mikhail was able to locate, however, proved well worth the trouble it took to uncover them. In addition to providing a vital record of one of the giants of Irish literature, Behan's letters -- especially those written without thought of publication -- give a far better sense of his exuberant verbal style than his plays or poetry. Mikhail introduces each letter and explains the circumstances in which it was written. He also annotates the letters, elucidating difficulties, noting the location and ownership of the letters whenever possible, and giving biographical information about the correspondents. The Letters of Brendan Behan also includes four poems that appear here for the first time, as well as extracts from early writings never before published. Numerous letters to editors, refused publication because of their outspokenness, are published here for the first time, and others, previously cut or censored, now appear in their original form. For anyone interested in Irish literature or contemporary drama -- and especially for readers and scholars of Behan's work -- The Letters of Brendan Behan is an invaluable collection.