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Hezbollah: A Short History. By Augustus Richard Norton. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-691-13124-5. Maps. Photographs. Glossary. Notes. Sources cited. Index. Pp. vi, 187. $16.95.
Few scholars are as qualified to situate Hezbollah in local, regional, and socioreligious contexts as Augustus Richard Norton. A prescient observer of Lebanon for three decades, his Amal and the Shi'a (University of Texas Press, 1987), remains the best treatment of the rise of social and political activism within the long-neglected Shi'a community. While Amal still figures prominently, Hezbollah has in recent decades established itself as the dominant outlet for Shi'a power, galvanizing broad-based support for its militant resistance to Israeli occupation of the south, more recently its repulsion of Israel's summer 2006 military onslaught.
The "Party of God" emerged out of a conjunction of the Lebanese civil war, which jolted the Shi'a community from 'quiescence to activism" (p. 14), the Iranian...