The #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Went Wrong? tells the story of his extraordinary life

Notes on a Century | Reflections of a Middle East Historian by Bernard Lewis and Buntzie Ellis Churchill tell Lewis’ life as a preeminent historian in the Middle East and around the world.

After September 11, Americans who had never given much thought to the Middle East turned to Bernard Lewis for an explanation, catapulting What Went Wrong? and later Crisis of Islam to become number one bestsellers. He was the first to warn of a coming “clash of civilizations,” a term he coined in 1957, and he led an amazing life, as much a political actor as a scholar of the Middle East. In this witty memoir, he reflected on the events that have transformed the region since World War II, up through the Arab Spring.

A pathbreaking scholar with command of a dozen languages, Lewis advised American presidents and dined with politicians from the shah of Iran to the pope. Over the years, he had tea at Buckingham Palace, befriended Golda Meir, and briefed politicians from Ted Kennedy to Dick Cheney. No stranger to controversy, he pulled no punches in his blunt criticism of those who saw him as the intellectual progenitor of the Iraq war. Like America’s other great historian-statesmen Arthur Schlesinger and Henry Kissinger, he was a figure of towering intellect and a world-class raconteur, which makes Notes on a Century essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of the Middle East.

Published by Penguin Books
May 10, 2012 | 416 Pages | ISBN 9781101575239

Bernard Lewis was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University and was the author of The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; The Emergence of Modern Turkey; The Arabs in History; and What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response; among other books. Lewis was internationally recognized as one of our era’s greatest historians of the Middle East. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Indonesian. Bernard Lewis died on 19 May 2018 at the age of 101, in New Jersey. He is buried in Trumpeldor Cemetery in Tel Aviv.