Dining with al-Qaeda

Pope's disjointed memoir of getting to know the Middle East--from Afghanistan to the Sudan--attempts to inform the listener and demystify the region. Narrator Paul Boehmer mostly tries too hard, affecting a sonorous, rounded tone that sounds out of place. His tone inserts him between the listener and the text and takes a lot of getting used to. Further, while Pope is South African and British, Boehmer's accent is thoroughly American. His efforts to inject twinkly humor into some phrases are awkward. He makes the gaffe (in this book) of pronouncing [Edward] Said as "sed," though his pronunciations of foreign words are convincing and his foreign accents mostly creditable. W.M. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

November 23, 2009
The 30 years Pope (Sons of the Conquerors
) has spent living and traveling in the Middle East, from a 1980 visit as an Oxford student through a decade-long stint as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal
, color this reflection on the region's recent history. Moving back and forth through time in vignettes set in Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, this fascinating memoir of his career tackles subjects as varied as the sexual attitudes of Middle Eastern men, the murder of Daniel Pearl, the Iraq-Iran War, and the poetry of the mystic Persian poet Hafez. The text has a loose episodic structure that sometimes feels desultory, though it does end with a series of chapters that focus on Iraq in the years before and after the American invasion. The author's writing is journalistic but imbued with the author's personality and long involvement in the region—he decries uncritical American support for Israel and the West's tendency to treat Islam and Muslim cultures monolithically. Pope's exquisite photographs accompany his vivid panorama of the region.