About this Book

ZAKHRAFA is the sixth regional memoir by Dr. Thomas Goltz on Turkey, the post-Soviet Caucasus and now the disappearing Middle East. While deep history is addressed in Goltz's familiar engaging manner, this deeply personal book focuses on SYRIA in the early 1980s (when a much younger Goltz was a student of Arabic in Damascus); EGYPT in the mid-1980s, focusing on "literary" Alexandria and the wild Sufii "birthday" celebrations in Cairo's "Cities of the Dead" and IRAQ following Gulf War I (1991), when the author became a "Rogue Relief Worker" in KURDISTAN. The book concludes with a special epilogue on the Turkish northern Aegean town of Ayvalik, the author's Middle Eastern "hometown" for the past 40 years.

"Goltz is Montana's Sir Richard Francis Burton." -- Dr./Professor Jerry Johnson, Montana State University