Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“A very funny and frequently insightful look at the world’s most combustible region.”—The New York Times Book Review
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz's 1991 classic account of his travels across the Middle East and through the Arabian Peninsula, now in eBook for the first time
With razor-sharp wit and insight, intrepid journalist Tony Horwitz gets beyond solemn newspaper headlines and romantic myths of the 1990s, to offer startling, honest close-ups of the Middle East. His quest for hot stories takes him from the tribal wilds of Yemen to the shell-pocked shores of Lebanon; from the sands of the Sudan to the souks of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Careering through fourteen countries, including the Sudan, Iraq, Israel, and Afghanistan, Horwitz travels light, packing a keen eye, a wicked sense of humor, and chutzpah in overwhelming measure. This wild and comic tale of misadventure reports on a fascinating world in which the ancient and the modern collide.
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Horwitz, London-based reporter for the Wall Street Journal , visited several Muslim countries plus Israel in 1988-89, sometimes accompanied by his equally intrepid wife. In Yemen he sampled qat , a narcotic, and bought a souvenir dagger, becoming ``possibly the first armed Jew to parade through the streets of Saada.'' He found Khartoum ``the world's most blighted city'' but liked the Sudanese, who ``exhibited none of the studied indirection or straight-out lying I'd become accustomed to in the Arab world.'' He made a lightning visit to Beirut under shellfire, covered the Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral in Tehran, and interviewed Nobel novelist Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo. Of the 14 countries he traveled, Israel seems to have pleased him the least: ``The first thing you notice, coming into Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest.'' Horwitz visited Iraq three times in the summer of '88 and returned after the invasion of Kuwait to find things ``paranoid and thuggish.'' His memoir is entertaining, often funny, and occasionally informative.
