A pigeon fancier said to me, '¬ÜIf you want to understand the Middle East, just look at my birds.'¬" It was approaching evening and on a rooftop in Damascus, several mules from its ancient centre, amid minarets and satellite dishes, the cooing of Waseem'¬"s pigeons, sixty or seventy of them, mingled oddly with the electronically amplified cry of a muezzin in the near distance. Waseem scowled the scowl of one who feigns to despise what he loves. '¬ÜThey are brutes,'¬" he said, '¬Üjust like the Americans are brutes.'¬" So begins Marius Kociejowski'¬"s excellent The Pigeon Wars of Damascus. Five years have passed since the author'¬"s last visit to Syria, the subject of his now-classic The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool, and he now finds Syria a much darker and more troublesome place. To make matters worse, Abed and Sulayman, the street philosopher and holy fool of his previous travelogue, are estranged, and only manage a sort-lived and shaky truce to please their English friend. Kociejowski is a metaphysical journalist in search of echoes rather than analogies, hints as opposed to verities, and who discovers once again among the outcasts at the periphery of Damascene society '¬ ; for the outcast is, to a degree, made of the very thing that rejects him '¬ ; a way to understand the clashes and challenges and changes refashioning both Syria and the Middle East as a whole.

Beautifully written, The Pigeon Wars of Damascus is essential reading for anyone who wishes a deeper and truer understanding of the Middle East and the political and economic pressures currently refashioning it, and reminds us once again of the deeper purpose of travel: to absorb and understand the spirit of a place, and to return changed.