Hugh Pope
Author, Reporter, Editor
Category: Reviews
-
I guess the title Dining with al-Qaeda was always going to attract attention, at least that was the idea! But as the Library Journal reviewer cited below says, it might make some people that I was going to give an inside scoop on terrorist mechanics or perhaps even a good recipe or two (thus competing…
-
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…
-
One of my fears in choosing to write Dining with al-Qaeda in the first person and as a compendium of personal stories was that I would be branded as an “Orientalist”, an abusive watchword when I was at university used against Middle East generalists. I always secretly thought that the old Orientalists knew a thing…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
David Byrne’s endorsement of Dining with al-Qaeda
-
One of the Arab world’s leading international magazines, al-Majalla, gave its readers a heads-up about the forthcoming publication of Dining with al-Qaeda in the new titles section of its 9 January edition. The 30 years Pope has spent living and travelling in the Middle East, from a 1980 visit as an Oxford student through a…
Hugh Pope 