“Over the course of reading and re-reading those 1,300 pages, I realized that he’d not only accomplished exactly what he’d set out to do, but also ultimately created the repository of a world which had long since died, opening a window onto Libyan history from 1911, when modernity stormed the Libyan coasts in all its brutality—Libya was the first country in history to suffer an aerial bombardment—all the way to the 1960s.”