The Sand Cafe: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)This book should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to become a journalist or date one.
Imagine M.A.S.H. meets Sex in the City with a little Jon Stewart thrown into the mix. A crowd of mostly youthful, virulent, edgy thirty-somethings with fire in their bellies as well as their loins are stuck for seven months in a 190-room Saudi hotel desperately looking for the next big scoop and a little warmth, with very limited supplies of either available. They lie, they cheat, they broadcast the most intimate details of their sex lives with colleagues, they literally hit each other, and somehow they still manage to broadcast the news.
The relatively small number of excellent journalists heroically stand up to a bewildering gauntlet of obstacles from cut throat colleagues to a dominating Pentagon, which tries to assert complete control over what the American public is allowed to learn about the Gulf War.
The writing in The Sand Caf? is terrific, insightful and hilariously funny. I read every chance I got. There's a lot to learn from this tour guide about how the media actually covers a war or fails miserably in the attempt through laziness and incompetence. Aside from getting an appalling sense of how the news is made, I also learned much about the military, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Arab attitudes towards one another and the West, about fanatics and why they are tolerated, about Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, not to mention a bit of history. All in all it's a great orientation to an ever-important region.
I loved reading it, and so will you.


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