The Modern Middle East

-The cover picture for Ilan Pappe's The Modern Middle East

I'm falling in love with a class that relies so heavily on wikipedia.

No, really. Having the reading be semi-entertaining while managing to be informative and pertinent to our class discussions, that's pretty neat; could read this stuff all day long.

Being a political science major with some prior knowledge of Middle East politics and economy, I enjoyed the assessment of the history of the Middle East. I particularly enjoyed the small bits about overdependence on petroleum and the oilocracy stuff (that's research topic #1 for most nerdy political science students who are interested in Globalization.)

There's an honors class that's offered here at Western Michigan University that details genocides in the past few hundred years (excluding the Holocaust, there's a class offered just for that particular genocide on it's own). That really gave me some insight into the Young Turks (Armenian Genocide of 1914), but that's a different blog for a different day (and probably a different class).

I've said it before, but I can't describe how excited I am to be moving in a direction of reading some contemporary literature. You'll find that me not having to decipher iambic pentameter or middle English and discuss it on a Monday morning makes me happier than it does to do it, and having something to read that I don't have to reread for comprehension several times makes me a happy camper as well :)

I hope everyone is quite happy with their papers, and I look forward to a discussion tomorrow on the Modern Middle East. Hopefully we Michiganders will have a budget in the morning, but it doesn't look swell at the moment.

See you all bright and early!
Dan