The New York Times bestselling author tells his extraordinary life story! After 9/11, Americans who hadn't given much thought to the Middle East turned to Bernard Lewis for an explanation, checking out his book What Went Wrong? and later his bestseller The Crisis in Islam. He was the first to warn of the coming "clash of civilizations," a term he coined in 1957. In this intelligent memoir, Lewis reflects on the events that transformed the region from World War II to the Arab Spring. Lewis was a pioneering scholar fluent in several languages. He advised American presidents and dined with politicians from the Shah of Iran to the Pope. Over the years, he drank tea at Buckingham Palace, befriended Golda Meir, and privy to politicians from Ted Kennedy to Dick Cheney. Some critics consider him the intellectual father of the Iraq War. We will read his candid writings about his tenure at Princeton, the volatile Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and the eclipse of secularism in the Islamic world. Like America's exceptional historians and politicians, Arthur Schlesinger and Henry Kissinger, Lewis is a character of supreme intelligence, making his observations on the past century essential reading for anyone interested in the fate of the Middle East.