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The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon's Life Struggle. By Michael Young. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010. 254 pp. $26.
Young, a Lebanese-American journalist, turns his memories of assassinated friends and humbled dreams into an emotional tale of Lebanon's political meanderings since 2005.
The good news, Young argues, is that at least part of the puzzle of Lebanon is a form of liberalism at its core. Whereas the region's autocrats are easy to read, Lebanon thrashes around with a "paradoxical" liberalism, in which "illiberal institutions tend to cancel each other out in the shadow of a sectarian system that makes the religious communities and sects more powerful than the state [which is] ... the main barrier to personal...