Month: March 2010
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In the original newspaper version on 28 March 2010, there were some photos from the book and excerpts. The photographer even managed to fit my 1.80m against the full height of the Galata Tower, a great landmark that I walk past every day, watching tourists twist and turn their camera lenses as they try to…
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Issandr El Amrani has posted this blog about Dining with al-Qaeda here on www.arabist.net. I hope he likes the rest of the book! For my part, I love arabist.net’s signature use of cartoons – this one from P. Jacobs’s series Blake et Mortimer (thanks for the reference, Max Rodenbeck!) and others from Tintin ‘s adventures…
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S. McGee is one of the top reviewers on amazon.com, and she has awarded Dining with al-Qaeda a “solid four stars” – a category McGee defines as representing “a book that is very good, albeit with a few significant flaws or shortcomings.” The flaw cited by McGee is that I bang my readers too hard…
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Pope, formerly the Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, here recounts a career’s worth of regional reportage that began in the early 1980s, an arc that follows his pursuit of interesting stories and interviews, as with an Islamic militant who debates with Pope about whether to kill him. Danger is often present in…
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I love reading the Economist from cover to cover. Their Middle East coverage can be especially good, even if I sometimes disagree with their editorials. The way the Economist really writes the news makes a more lasting imprint on my mind than other media. I always envy the pithy puns in the headlines, too. In…
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In its Spring 2010 edition, the Washington DC-based periodical Democracy: A Journal of Ideas published this letter from me arguing that American media’s responsibility for the U.S. invasion of Iraq results from a broader problem than just a tendency to kow-tow to the former government of President Bush … a situation I’d come to see…
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This should be a set text on how to write a neutral review! Reviewed by L. Carl Brown March/April 2010, Vol 2, Number 89 Ranging geographically from southern Sudan to Afghanistan, this book covers not just terrorism, wars, and occupations but also sexual mores, architecture, and poetry. Pope chronicles his three decades covering the Middle…
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The main public event to launch Dining with al-Qaeda in New York will be held at Strand Book Store, 7pm-8pm, on Tuesday, 30th March 2010. (See Strand calender here). I’ll be discussing the book and its principal themes – including American media coverage of the Middle East, and perhaps modern-day Orientalism as well – with…
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Thomas Crampton, who calls me a ‘recovering journalist’, perhaps because he is one himself (from the other stable, the New York Times), came for tea and left with my first instant video interview. In his new capacity as Social Media Guru (for Ogilvy, the advertising agency), he whipped out what I thought was his cellphone,…
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Who could ask for a more wonderful review? GOLDEN NOTEBOOK A journalist in the Middle East Mar 4th 2010 PALESTINE is yesterday’s news, sighed a bored editor as he rejected Hugh Pope’s offering. It was a familiar reaction. Mr Pope, a principled and thoughtful reporter, tramped the Middle East for 30 years in a forlorn…
Hugh Pope 