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.
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.
Watching the demonstrations in Tehran that surrounded the funeral of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Horwitz savors the irony of protesters pausing to chat amicably with a Jewish-American journalist before resuming their cries of “Death of the United States.” In a new epilogue, the author revisits Baghdad, which remains filled with monuments to Saddam Hussein’s monomaniacal regime, despite the damage inflicted by Operation Desert Storm.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. Alternately bemused and annoyed, he observes Moamar Kadafi’s agents bungle a press junket intended to disprove American charges that he was manufacturing chemical weapons. “It go bang, it go boom, we buy,” a shopkeeper cheerfully informs him. He samples the intoxicating sensation of chewing qat, a national pastime in Yemen, but sobers up when he discovers how appalling easy it is to buy weapons of mass destruction there-at bargain prices ($20 for a grenade, $5 for a bayonet, $120 for an assault rifle). Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tony Horwitzs 1991 classic account of his travels across the Middle East and through the Arabian Peninsula, now in eBook for. As a free-lance journalist, he roamed the Middle East looking for news stories Western journals would buy, but seems to have been more adept at finding the story behind the headlines, and giving the reader a picture of the daily lives of ordinary people in countries in crisis.
Unfortunately Tony had to confess he had already done all three. Not long after he arrived in Yemen he was advised never to drink the water, eat the food or chew the hallucinatory leaf Qat. An award-winning reporter, Horwitz offers his often comic impressions of Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Dubai and Sudan. A very funny and frequently insightful look at the world’s most combustible region. Journalist Tony Horowitz went to Arabia without a job, and spent two years visiting 13 Muslim countries and Israel, writing copy for whoever could be persuaded to take it. BAGHDAD WITHOUT A MAP AND OTHER MISADVENTURES IN ARABIA, Tony Horwitz (Plume: $10.).
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