This looks to be an interesting new book. Not exactly light holiday reading, Salon.com made it their top story today and devoted 6 pages to a review of the book and the man behind it.

Quote: Yet despite its flaws, "The Great War for Civilisation" is a magisterial achievement. It largely succeeds in its audacious double mission, to show and to explain the bloody tragedies that have afflicted the Middle East. Fisk's eyewitness reports from the killing fields are more than just bang-bang accounts: They are implacable and indispensable documents, grim reminders of what actually happens when nations go to war. And his devastating analysis of the reasons for those wars exposes the sins not just of the West, but of the Arab world as well. Fisk is a polemicist, but his anger derives from a Swiftian humanism. He is appalled by official lies and hypocrisy and driven to show, in nightmarish detail, the human suffering and death that results from them. And if he emphasizes and perhaps at times overemphasizes the culpability of the powerful -- in particular of America and Israel -- that perspective is not just excusable, but much needed in an intimidated intellectual climate in which received positions have gone largely unchallenged.