Category: Events
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Description of Dining with al-Qaeda book talks in Oxford, Cambridge and London – and an encounter with British adventurer Rory Stewart
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Working in America is completely different from trying to get anything done in the Middle East. In five hyperactive days, only once did something go wrong. Spring rains flooded the rail tracks on Rhode Island, and when I arrived at New York’s Penn Station, my train to Washington DC was running at least 90 minutes…
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One of my presentations of Dining with al-Qaeda‘s messages about Mideast coverage in the U.S. had a good showing in The Morningside Post (1 April 2010 post here), the news and opinion site run by the students of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Seeing in cold print that I had said that…
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When I was asked by a grand American newspaper to cover the Middle East in 2000, my editor at the Wall Street Journal airily handed me responsibility for coverage of thirty-odd countries — and that “Arab-Israeli thing”. I didn’t even have an assistant. Having already spent two decades in the region, I was used to…
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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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The arrival of the first properly printed copy of a book is a sweet moment indeed. After years of work, it’s been fired, glazed and is as good as I could make it. Hard covers, embossed dust jacket, author photo … it’s finished! For the first time, I can read the text for pleasure, not…
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The Audiobook CD of Dining with al-Qaeda will go on sale shortly after the book is published on 16 March. The reader is Paul Boehmer, a soft-spoken American theater actor acclaimed for his ability to give voice to everybody from Thai police detectives, pimps and prostitutes to reading out Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. The…
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The French rights to Dining with al-Qaeda have already been sold! The translation will be done by Les Presses de l’universite Laval in Quebec, a respected Canadian university press. PUL will soon also be publishing a translation into French of my second book Sons of the Conquerors as well. The distributor of their French-lanugage edition…
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Dining with al-Qaeda will be featured at venerable Washington DC bookshop Politics & Prose on 31 March 2010. I’ve been invited to do a reading, discussion and book signing at 7pm – hope to see you there! Politics & Prose 5015 Connecticut Ave NW Washington, DC 20008 (202) 364-1919
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A major theme of Dining with al-Qaeda is the difficulty reporters like me faced in translating what I experienced in the Middle East into reports that really explained the situation to American readers. Sometimes I felt that we’d invented a virtual Middle East with our convoluted attempts to bridge this divide, using artificial one-label-fits-all concepts…
Hugh Pope 