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A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War

Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The centennial of World War I saw an abundance of books, articles, monographs, and conferences dealing with the history of the Great War, its memory and legacy, in its different fronts. The scholarship on the European experience of the war traditionally discussed both the “war front” and the “home front” of the war, while making the connection between the two “fronts” and the combined political, diplomatic, cultural, and social histories of this pivotal event. However, the historiography of the Middle Eastern theaters of war focused for many years on specific aspects of the Great War, with a clear preference for its political, diplomatic, and military dimensions, while neglecting many other crucial questions and themes. Those included, for example, the experience of civilians, everyday life during the war, the effects of the war on women and children, the ways the war had changed the urban environment, as well as the war’s social and cultural manifestations, to mention just a few. In recent years, with the publication of various original studies that examine the war through other lenses, while looking at the different theaters of war in the Middle East, the state of research on the Great War is beginning to change in Middle Eastern studies as well. Leila Tarazi Fawaz’s fascinating book, A Land of Aching Hearts, serves as an important contribution to this new and exciting avenue of research. With this book, Fawaz embarked on a challenging project: to write a social history of mainly (but not only) Greater Syria during World War I, while focusing on the experience of the men and women who lived through the war. In Fawaz’s words, “This book stands, in many ways, as a tribute to the everyday heroes who faced adversity as best as they could. To them (. . .) World War I was not only a global event, but also a personal story that varied across the broad Middle Eastern landscape” (p. 2). The everyday heroes book reviews