Saudi Aramco World

By Nesreen | March 14th, 2008 | No Comments

Saudi Aramco World magazine’s latest issue has selected Encounters with the Middle East for its latest Recommended Reading list! Here’s the review link.

Here’s What they said:
Encounters is an earnest collection of writings from mostly American, mostly young people, most of them seeing the Middle East for the first time: “a heady cocktail of jet-lag, adventurousness, and naiveté,” as one narrator describes her own state. Most of the incidents and encounters are on the delicate everyday level: Drinking too much tea on a bus ride in Turkey; smoking molasses-flavored tobacco in the sheesha in Alexandria; getting grouchy from lack of sleep in the Old City of Jerusalem; committing Arabic bloopers in a Kuwaiti barbershop; bonding with a cab driver in Damascus; joining a family in Bahrain to watch a Shia ritual. Small details of difference and interaction are savored, wide-eyed. Although an occasional ugly-American moment creeps in, stereotypes are mostly avoided, and the simple and instructive pleasure of the friendly encounter carries the day. —Ann Walton Sieber (MA08)