{"id":33830,"date":"2014-06-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-13T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beirut.com\/33830\/eight-essential-books-about-beirut"},"modified":"2023-05-08T08:33:40","modified_gmt":"2023-05-08T08:33:40","slug":"eight-essential-books-about-beirut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beirut.com\/en\/33830\/eight-essential-books-about-beirut\/","title":{"rendered":"Eight Essential Books About Beirut"},"content":{"rendered":"Beirut, oh Damsel of the World, Beirut. How much ink has been spilled — and let\u2019s only think of the ink, for now — to tell your story?

Our city has become something of a literary genre in itself. So much so, that the name itself has become a narrative device<\/a>. With so many scripts and codes imbued in a geographic area of — what? 20? 200 km2? — it\u2019s easy to get lost around here. So here is a (very rough) map for the dazed and confused:

Beyroutes: A Guide to Beirut<\/b><\/big><\/big>

(Image via On Lab<\/a>)

Every list of books about a city should include a guide book. This one<\/a>, however, is a not quite like the guides you\u2019re used to.


(Image via Archileb<\/a>)

Featuring a martyrdom walking tour and a cut-out guide to “staying safe” in Dahiyeh, this book — which is really a collection of insightful essays disguised as a guidebook — is a great resource for both the sophisticated tourist who would never accept that label, and the jaded local who just can\u2019t stop loving this city. It\u2019s also beautifully designed.

Beirut<\/b><\/big><\/big>

(Image via UC Press<\/a>)

Now for the more scholarly stuff. If you only read one history of Beirut, make it this one<\/a> by the late, great Samir Kassir. Because it\u2019s a history book, it\u2019s hard not to nitpick. Kassir\u2019s tone is sometimes too flowery, and there\u2019s a strange inconsistency between the chapters that are critical of the colonial governments that ruled over the city, and the chapters that seem very enthusiastic about their urban policies that pretty much erased medieval Beirut.

And yet, despite all that, this mammoth book is full of amazing, meticulously-researched stories from a wide variety of sources, covering everything from Roman Beirut to the Civil War. The book tells this unwieldy history with both an eye for detail and a view of the bigger picture, in a way that doesn\u2019t feel overwhelming. And that\u2019s why we highly recommend it as a thrown-in-the-deep-end introduction to the complexities of this place.

Lebanon Shot Twice<\/b><\/big><\/big>