I made the mistake of picking up Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, (available in Canada and the United States since Sept. 29), late in the evening, expecting an hour of relaxing reading before bed. Within minutes, I was bolt upright, frantically dog-earing pages, and calling to my husband to read him passages out loud. The Cauldron is a rollicking good read. It’s also an antidote to the simplistic thinking that’s overtaken so much public discourse about the Middle East.  

Packed with fascinating anecdotes and describing the grand sweep of Middle Eastern history since 1900, Sebag Montefiore frames the modern Middle East as a roiling “cauldron” filled with competing ethnicities, political groups, and philosophies, whose divisions have been exacerbated by meddlesome external actors. One of the book’s greatest achievements is to show the Middle East in all its multiple identities: “Turco-Circassians, Syrian Turkmen, Jordanian Chechens, Iraqi Kurds, Greek Orthodox Arabs, Armenian Jerusalemites, Palestinian Citizens of Israel…the complexity of African and Arab identities in Sudan.” Add to this list Jews, Alawites, Bahai, Maronites, Circassians, Berbers, Chaldeans, and a host of other groups whose histories, literatures, and national hopes and dreams Sebag Montefiore illuminates.

His Middle East spans from Morocco’s Atlantic coast—where the Sebag family originated—through the Persian........

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