King Hussein of Jordan

By Nigel Ashton

Yale, 431 pages, $35

Lion of Jordan

By Avi Shlaim

Knopf, 723 pages, $35

Of all the heroes and villains in the Middle East drama over the past 50 years, King Hussein of Jordan was by far the most complex character. Two biographies of Hussein bin Talal (1935-99) aim to capture the intrigue and drama surrounding him from the moment that, at age 15 in 1951, he watched his grandfather, King Abdullah, shot dead by a Palestinian gunman on the steps of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem for attempting to make peace with Israel.

Forty-four years later, as Jordan's ruler, Hussein would return to Jerusalem for the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who himself had been assassinated for signing an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. As Nigel Ashton's "King Hussein of Jordan" and Avi Shlaim's "Lion of Jordan" make clear, the intervening years saw one of the most extraordinary political high-wire acts in modern history.

Both books are written by professors of international relations, and both draw on new source material. Mr. Ashton had access to Hussein's private papers, including the king's secret correspondence with not only the U.S. and Britain but also Israel. Mr. Ashton, however, didn't begin work on "King Hussein of Jordan" until after his subject's death nine years ago from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He thus never met Hussein, and the book suffers as a result from a certain dryness.