The Hills of Adonis by Colin Thubron is a lucid and insightful account of travelling in Lebanon just before the civil war.A House of Many Mansions by Kamal Salibi is a history of Lebanon which looks specifically at the causes of the civil war.Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation is a heart-wrenching journalistic account of the war itself.There are many excellent coffee-table books about Lebanon. One of the best (and most expensive) is Fluvio Roiter's Lebanon.