Lebanon: Where East Meets West

On turning forty the author leaves Paris and the West for Asia. En route he spends a Summer teaching English in Beirut, a city that was once a byword for civil war, terrorism and the clash between East and West. Twenty years after the war ended, there are still scarred buildings and psyches, and religious and ethnic fault lines, but the country has been reborn. Few countries have had so long and complex a history, and few so tortured a recent past, but Lebanon has emerged from it all with a...