On the memoir of former Lebanese communist party leader George Hawi: while they do contain very useful and important information on a very important period of Lebanese and Arab contemporary political history, it is important to read them with the caution that one applies to the account of any politician, on the left or on the right or between the right and the left and center, where Hawi wound up at the end of his life. It is revealing to read them today to compare where Hawi was at the time of the interviews (mid-1990s) with where he ended at the time of his assassination when he affiliated himself with the traditional right-wing position of the Maronite patriarch, perhaps to help the political fortunes of his son Rafi who did not win a seat in the last election despite the pathetic attempts by Hawi to align himself (and his son) with Amin Gemayyel, who failed to even obtain a seat for his son Pierre, if Gen. `Awn did not interfere at the last minute to allow one member from outside of his list to obtain a parliamentary seat. In Arab publishing there are no editors, and often not even proofreaders, and this is no exception. The editor of the book, did not know details of the Lebanese civil war, and could have asked better and more probing questions. But he asked good questions about the Arab political scene. Sharbil also did not know much about he politics of Lebanese communism and the Palestinian resistance, and it showed. When Hawi (mistakenly) mentioned that Abu Hasan Salamah was around the time of the Israeli installation of Bashir Gemayyel as president in 1982, when in fact Salamah had been dead, Sharbil did not even notice. Hawi's account of his role within the communist party was not all that accurate: Hawi was as hardline and as Stalinist as was Khalid Bakdash. Hawi's rise in the 1960s and 1970s was due to his unwavering loyalty to Soviet Leninist communism. After Hawi's departure from the party in the 1990s, he became a businessman, and a wealthy one by some account. One veteran communist in Lebanon told me that Hawi (along with two of his closest comrades) took whatever the party had accumulated in terms of aid given to it by various regimes, and that this was the seed of his business ventures. I asked the current leaders of the Lebanese communist party about that story, and I was told that it was not "entirely" true. One thing is for sure now: the Lebanese Communist Party is very poor today and can barely operate its radio station (Sawt Ash-Sha`b), and it had sold its TV Station (which became the basis of New TV) to Tahsin Khayyat. But the one memoir that you have to read is the new account by veteran Arab journalist/publisher Riyad Ar-Rayyis. But that is another story, and another post.