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Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean

Levant is a book of cities. It describes three former centers of great wealth, pleasure, and freedom—Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut—cities of the Levant region along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In these key ports at the crossroads of East and West, against all expectations, cosmopolitanism and nationalism flourished simultaneously. People freely switched identities and languages, released from the prisons of religion and nationality. Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and worshipped as neighbors.
Distinguished historian Philip Mansel is the first to recount the colorful, contradictory histories of Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut in the modern age. He begins in the early days of the French alliance with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century and continues through the cities' mid-twentieth-century fates: Smyrna burned; Alexandria Egyptianized; Beirut lacerated by civil war.
Mansel looks back to discern what these remarkable Levantine cities were like, how they differed from other cities, why they shone forth as cultural beacons. He also embarks on a quest: to discover whether, as often claimed, these cities were truly cosmopolitan, possessing the elixir of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews for which the world yearns. Or, below the glittering surface, were they volcanoes waiting to erupt, as the catastrophes of the twentieth century suggest? In the pages of the past, Mansel finds important messages for the fractured world of today.

Levant was one of Cornwall’s ‘Champion’ mines, and the largest producer in the Land’s End peninsula. First worked in the 1790s it came into steady production for copper around 1820, and for tin after 1852. A by product of the mine was arsenic, which was removed from black tin as a gas then condensed in flues to be collected as a saleable product. Levant had a ‘man engine' to transport miners up and down the mine – essentially a long powered rod with platforms. It was a dangerous business, and on October 20th 1919 the linkage between rod and engine broke, sending 31 miners to their death and injuring many more. It was one of the worst tragedies in the history of Cornish mining, and hastened the decline of the mine, which closed in 1930.

Levant Mine is probably one of the most famous mines in Cornwall. It stands on the cliffs at Pendeen, in an area of outstanding natural beauty (See photographs of cliffs) .It is also a Devon and Cornwall Mining World Heritage Site. When open this mine produced 1000’s of tons of Copper, Tin and Arsenic.The Arsenic was produced by scorching tin.Unfortunently, no one at the time realised how toxic arsenic was and the white powder was just shovelled into barrows.Arsenic can even be absorbed through the skin.

Canada's "no. 1 defender of freedom of speech" and the bestselling author of Shakedown makes the timely and provocative case that when it comes to oil, ethics matter just as much as the economy and the environment.

In 2009, Ezra Levant's bestselling book Shakedown revealed the corruption of Canada's human rights commissions and was declared the "most important public affairs book of the year." In Ethical Oil, Levant turns his attention to another hot-button topic: the ethical cost of our addiction to oil. While many North Americans may be aware of the financial and environmental price we pay for a gallon of gas or a barrel of oil, Levant argues that it is time we consider ethical factors as well. With his trademark candor, Levant asks hard-hitting questions: With the oil sands at our disposal, is it ethically responsible to import our oil from the Sudan, Russia, and Mexico? How should we weigh carbon emissions with human rights violations in Saudi Arabia? And assuming that we can't live without oil, can the development of energy be made more environmentally sustainable? In Ethical Oil, Levant exposes the hypocrisy of the West's dealings with the reprehensible regimes from which we purchase the oil that sustains our lifestyles, and offers solutions to this dilemma. Readers at all points on the political spectrum will want to read this timely and provocative new book, which is sure to spark debate.


From the Hardcover edition.