Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon (Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures)

I find this book extremely expensive at $132. If its pages were made of gold I would buy it. But it is a thin volume of fewer than 200 pages of text. However, it has a grand title and I decided to hit the unievrsity library and borrow it. And I did. The first observation I should make is that it is a good book on the subject matter and the author is honest in his attempt to link music to culture and national identity. Yet it is largely descriptive and poor on intellectual content. The author seems to draw heavily from the plays and musicals of Fairuz and Rahbanis, which is good if the reader is into theatre, but the title promises to talk about nationalism, which is not seen anywhwere in the book. One would expect at least a discussion of the debate on lebanese identity inside Lebanon and the various disagreements over its history and how music was a main component of modern identity in the country, etc., while citing standard texts from Arab and western sources on culture and the nation. But this was missing. I felt starved of a nice intellectual discussion while reading this book. It is entertaining anyway, and I did not waste my time.