****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
So many books about the Mideast show a narrow point of view, from someone who spent a few years in one or two countries. Mr. MacFarquhar's experience begins when he was a young boy living in the fenced compound of American oil workers in Libya. His life centered around swimming and sailing in the Mediterranean, with the odd (and they were often quite odd) contact with the locals.It was years later, while studying in California, he decided he had to return to the Mideast, and as a journalist. He traveled and lived in countries from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, and his writing makes it clear that each nation has its own unique history and personality. He introduces us to local friends he'd known over years of work and new acquaintances, royalty, dissidents, journalists, and the workers he encounters. All have their opinions and experiences.It isn't a powder-puff treatment; he tells of the Saudi religious police and their insane demands and power, and of another government that tired of maintaining a prison crammed with political prisoners, so they simply massacred the inmates and left the empty shell in the desert. He tells of educated, peaceful, middle-class women imprisoned and molested for the crime of driving a car. There are shocking cases here of brutality, but many more encounters with normal people going about their lives, trying to support their kids.There is some danger to his life of world travel, of course, and his work is interrupted by severe injury - near death, in fact - when he's run down by a bus... in New York City.After reading this book I gave it to my 17-year-old son; he's enjoying it. It's light enough to be interesting to an educated teenager, and will greatly balance and expand his impressions of the Mideast. Whatever he hears from his friends, teachers, or coworkers, he'll never be able to accept any claim that all Mideastern countries or all Muslims can be lumped into any common stereotype.
