The Middle East -- Context for Conflict

Iraq, Iran, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf States
Historical background and context for understanding today's news.

Copyright © 2003 Richard Seltzer

Skip the explanation and go straight to the table of contents

This Web page shows the table of contents of our Middle East CD, with 240 books. Internal links will take you to the various sections, but you cannot get to the books themselves here on the Web.

This CD was compiled by Richard Seltzer. The books themselves are in the public domain. You can copy them onto your hard drive for convenience, or make an archival copy of the CD, as backup in case of damage to the original. But the collection and its indexes, created for your convenience, are under copyright. Please contact us first if you are interested in making copies of this CD for commercial purposes. seltzer@samizdat.com

This CD contains the full text of 11 "Country Studies" published as printed books by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress between 1987 and 1995 under a program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Army.

Each country study is presented as a single document, plain text form -- easy to read, to print, and to search (rather than as a collection of over 100 separate documents for each book, that you could find on the Web). The tables in the appendix of each book are presented as html documents.

With the exception of the Persian Gulf States (which covers Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates), each of the Country Studies consists of five chapters:
Chapter 1 -- Historical Setting
Chapter 2 -- The Society and Its Environment
Chapter 3 -- The Economy
Chapter 4 -- Government and Politics
Chapter 5 -- National Security

In addition, we include:

For details about our publishing service, check the readme document on this CD, and please visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat

If you would like to have your PC (with speakers) read these texts aloud to you, while they are displayed in text on the screen, see below about the free ReadPlease software that we have included on this CD.

Teachers' and Students' Guide: Suggestions on how to get the most out of your books on CD ROM

Table of Contents

[NB -- on the Web version of the Table of Contents the links are not live. On the CD itself, you would click on a title to open a book.]

Country Studies

2008 CIA World Factbook

with maps, flags, and up-to-date information on every country in the world). This is an interlinked set of hundreds of HTML documents. You should open it with your Web browser.

History -- Ancient and Medieval

History -- Modern

Travel

Literature

Historical Novels

Religion and Philosophy

About the Country Studies Program

These Country Studies were previously published in hard copy by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress between 1987 and 1995 under a program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Army.

"The Country Studies Series presents a description and analysis of the historical setting and the social, economic, political, and national security systems and institutions of countries throughout the world and examines the interrelationships of those systems and the ways they are shaped by cultural factors.

"The books represent the analysis of the authors and should not be construed as an expression of an official United States Government position, policy, or decision. The authors have sought to adhere to accepted standards of scholarly objectivity. Corrections, additions, and suggestions for changes from readers will be welcomed for use in future hard copy editions (E-mail frds@loc.gov).

"Information contained in the Country Studies On-Line is not copyrighted and thus is available for free and unrestricted use by researchers. As a courtesy, however, appropriate credit should be given to the series."

The online version can be found at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html

How to install and use the free ReadPlease software included on this CD

Text-to-voice conversion software can allow you to hear as well as read these books. So you can test this capability and decide if it might be valuable to you, we include the include the installation file for ReadPlease 2003 on this CD. You can use that file to install a trial copy of ReadPlease Plus, which is a commercial-quality product and can read files of any size. This trial copy is good for 30 days, after which, if you wish, you could buy a license from ReadPlease for $49.95. As an alternative, you can use that same file to install their free version, which doesn't expire, but which can only handle 16K of text at a time; which means that to read a book, you would have to copy and paste one peice of text after another.

Click here if you would like to install this software. When you click on that link, you will be asked wheter you want to save it on your computer or just run it. Choose Save -- it will only take about 10 Mbytes; so choose Save. Then select which version you want to install and the directory that you'd like to put it in. When the rapid, automatic installation is done, you will be able to open ReadPlease by clicking on an icon on your desktop.

When running ReadPlease, click on File, then Open, and browse to the texts you are interested on the CD (or any other text file you have). Click on Play and it will start "reading" the book aloud to you. Highlight a chunk of text (of any size) with your browser and then click on Selection, and it will read the text you selected. Controls in the right column allow you to change the speed of the voice (with a sliding bar), change the font size (with a sliding bar), and switch among four different voices (with the right and left arrows).

When you run ReadPlease, you see the text, with yellow highlighting moving from one word to the next, while you hear that same text. And you can at any time edit the text in the video window. Just position your cursor, click you mouse, and type whatever you like -- for instance, annotation or marks to show where you last stopped reading. Then save the edited file on your hard drive.

Please keep in mind that ReadPlease is their software not ours. They are the experts on it. They have even better versions with even clearer, more natural voices, which they sell. You can listen to samples at their Web site www.readplease.com, where you can also see detailed help files.  And you can contact them at: ReadPlease Corporation, 121 Cherry Ridge Road, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada P7G 1A7. Phone: 807-474-7702


Tips for using/enjoying the texts on this CD:

The easiest way to get started is to click on My Computer, then on your CD drive, then on index.html. That should bring you to index.html, in Word or your Web browser, or WordPad or Notepad, depending on your computer's setup.

From the index, click on an individual work to see the full text in your browser or in Word. Click "Back" in your browser to return here.  Use the "find" function in your browser (under Edit/Find in both Netscape and IE) to find any word or phrase within a document.

If you use Word, you can Select All [under Edit], and modify the font and type size (to make the letters larger and easier to read) [under Format and Font], and save the files on your hard drive [under File, Save As] with whatever changes you have made (including notes you made while reading).


We will continue to add new books to this CD as they become available. If you buy a CD directly from us, you have the right to buy an upgraded version of the same CD for just $10, a maximum of four times per year. The "upgraded" version will contain all the texts, not just the new ones..

For details on all our offerings see http://www.samizdat.com/readme.html

You can buy these CDs at our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat

This CD -- The Middle East: Context for Conflict -- is available for $29 at our online store.

This site is published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com

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Everything But the Internet available at our online store  gathers the complete non-Internet works of Richard Seltzer on CD, in plain text, with software that lets you listen as well as read. It includes: The Name of Hero, Ethiopia Through Russian Eyes, The Lizard of Oz, Without a Myth, Spit and Polish, Mercy, Rights Crossing, short stories, articles, book reviews, and poems.

A library for the price of a book.

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