Bøger af Fred A. Reed

Southern California in the late 1950s has the look and feel of a midsummer morningbright and still. For two young brothers, the wide world is full of promise. Together they set out to explore it as one, ever alert to the sound of their mothers whistle calling them home. But by late afternoon, dark clouds gather on the horizon and the storm soon breaks.That storm is the war in Vietnam, and its fury sweeps away all the noble lies of the social conservatism their parents endorsed.Then, in a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, the eldest son happens upon a novel by Kazantzakis that entices him to Greece. There, he learns the language, and in that ancient land that has seen it all, heard it all, and done it all, he encounters militant Cretan students and the woman who will become his life partner in exile.But for the younger brother there will be no escape. Trapped by failed marriages, smothered by parental guidance and an education system exposed as the states recruiting agent, he is dispatched to Vietnam. Fifteen years later he lies buried on a lonely hillside in New Zealand, dead of the wounds he sustained in that war.Shocked by the death of his younger brother, Fred Reed sets out on a series of journeys of discovery and understanding. By way of Iran in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution; the Anatolian highlands of the mystic Bediuzzaman Said Nursi; in pursuit of ancient and modern iconoclasts in Syria and Lebanon; he comes under the spell of Islam. In its embrace he finds a renewed brotherhood; in its discipline, liberation.Then We Were One challenges us with its conclusion that indictment, absolution and redemption, though we must seek them, are not ours to ultimately possess.

Fred A. Reeds fifth book on the Middle East and the wars of the Ottoman succession traces the roots of Islamic fundamentalism, as currently enacted by Hezbollah and other Islamic fundamentalist organizations, to the iconoclasts of sixth- and seventh-century Damascus.

A vivid, contemporary travelogue by Fred A. Reed. From Bosnian actuality to Macedonian potentiality, Reeds travels in this region lead him to encounter a landscape inscribed with a shocking testimony: ethno-racialist aspirations remain the only coin in which peoples feel they can express their belonging, their social solidarity the only credible alternative to the blight of free market globalism.

Fred Reed went to Iran driven by discontent with the official Western view of that country as a den of fundamentalist fanatics and terrorists. Not surprisingly, he found that the Iranians had reasons - excellent reasons - for acting as they did. The Iran-Iraq war, cynically prolonged by the Western powers who armed Saddam Hussein against Khomeini's poorly armed but highly motivated revolutionary guards and volunteers, furnished the most conclusive example. Iranian history, in its meeting with the peculiar traditions of Shi'ite Islam, provided a wealth of others. In Persian Postcards, Iranians of many persuasions speak on the issues of their society, on regional politics, on the role of religion in life, on public and private morality. We meet artists and filmmakers, philosophers and mollahs, establishment men and dissidents, women speaking on women's issues and on life, members of parliament and "terrorists". Persian Postcards is more than a journalistic report, an academic treatise, or a travel book, although it enfolds elements of all three. It explores an unknown quarter, a territory inhabited by people of culture, dignity and poetic genius, moved by force which defy the impoverished classification theology of Reason and Technique. Persian Postcards is not only about Iran. It is about us.