The ghosts of Martyrs Square : an eyewitness account of Lebanon's life struggle /

THERE are many ghosts in Beirut's Martyrs Square, among them numerous courageous and outspoken Lebanese journalists. Samir Kassir, a political commentator and opponent of Syrian meddling in Lebanon, was murdered by car bomb in June 2005. A year earlier, he had summed up the Lebanese paradox in a conversation with Michael Young: "Yes, we were a laboratory for violence, but we were also, before that, a laboratory for modernity, and in some ways we still are." In his illuminating and knowledgeable book, "The Ghosts of Martyrs Square," Young explores those two contradictory strands by looking at a crucial period of Lebanese history, 2005 to 2009. In 2005, a momentous year for the country, Rafik Hariri, the onetime prime minister, was assassinated with a giant truck bomb. His murder sparked weeks of street protests that became known as the "Cedar Revolution" and led Syria, which was widely blamed for the killing but denied it, to withdraw its troops after decades of occupation. Young, who is the opinion editor of The Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon, is an expert guide to the complex and frequently deadly machinations of Lebanese politics. Born in the United States to a Lebanese mother and an American father, he was taken to Lebanon at the age of 7. Like Lebanon itself, he draws on the cultures of both East and West, bringing a passionate engagement to this account of his adopted homeland. Growing up in Beirut, Young met many of the country's political and military leaders, and even as a teenager he had a reporter's eye for detail. He recounts a meeting in 1977 with Bashir Gemayel, the Christian militia leader assassinated in 1982. "His parting gifts to me," Young writes, "were a signed photograph and an unexploded 120-mm. mortar shell with stenciled Hebrew writing on it - a strange item to give a 14-year-old, and not particularly easy to smuggle into our apartment in a Muslim-majority neighborhood controlled by Bashir's enemies." Young is also strong on Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that controls much of southern Lebanon, and its enigmatic leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. The war of 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah "took everybody by surprise," Young says. "It was a war of total improvisation, . . . a war without sharp contours, compensated for through higher levels of unfocused ferocity." As Israeli planes pounded Hezbollah's stronghold in the south of the city, Young and his friends gathered at the Chase, a cafe in downtown Beirut. The waiters boasted that the Chase never closed, though with bombs falling nearby, it did shut its doors at midnight, which almost counts as "never" in the middle of a war. "The Ghosts of Martyrs Square" is studded with evocative anecdotes like that one, which tantalize the reader but regrettably are not properly incorporated into the narrative. Perhaps Young lacked the confidence to write more in the first person (there are no entries at all in the index for Young, Michael) or to tell us more about his mixed American-Lebanese heritage and his life as an editor on an English-language newspaper. Can he really publish any opinion he wants? The reader longs for details about Young's nights of drinking at the Chase while Israeli jets screamed overhead. That would have added necessary color and human drama to what is an incredibly complex political story. After all, Damascus's reach still stretches into the heart of Beirut. As Young tells us, in December 2009, four years after Rafik Hariri's murder, his son Saad, who succeeded him as prime minister, visited Damascus and embraced Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president. As they say in Romania, another former Ottoman province, "Kiss the hand you cannot bite." Adam LeBor is the author of "City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa."

A clear-eyed, poignant study of the political developments in Lebanon since the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri on Feb. 14, 2005. Daily Star opinion editor Young, who interviewed many of the main protagonists involved in Lebanon's unfolding tragedy as part of his writing for the Wall Street Journal and other publications, titles his work after the Beirut crossroads that became a magnet for a growing demonstration of public outrage following al-Hariri's death by car bomb, widely believed to be the hand of Syria, which had dominated the country during the previous three decades. A determinedly pluralistic country, Lebanon was devastated by the 15-year civil war beginning in 1974. Then, Palestinian groups, expelled from Jordan, relocated to Beirut and exacerbated Christian and Syrian hostilities, eventually provoking Israeli invasion, which in turn nourished the growth of Hezbollah, uneasily tied to Iran. Young, a self-described "product of the war years," recognizes the "dysfunctional" quality to the Lebanese way of doing things, but sees a strength rather than weakness in its sectarianism. The Independence Intifada, which had galvanized around Martyrs Square in the summer of 2005, brought together "a perfect merging of interests" in the popular opposition to the hegemony of Syria. Young pursues these hopeful events, dashed by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's "reckless provocation" of Israeli bombardment in 2006, in an attempt to regain what the party, and Syria, had lost the previous year. In examining the subsequent assassinations, sectarian violence and public cries for justice that erupted following al-Hariri's assassination, the author ably navigates the tangle of oligarchs that helped bring the country to its present situation, including the recent elections that demonstrate the Lebanese yearning for stability. Astute and immensely readable. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.