If I had to pick one book to get my footing in the history of the modern Middle East, its ironies and intractability, there's no question I'd pick David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

It's a history of the birth of the modern Middle East in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the new Arab successor states by the European powers.

Just shy of a masterpiece.