Hugh Pope
Author, Reporter, Editor
Category: Reviews
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There’s one line in the Publishers Weekly review of Dining with al-Qaeda — the one about the “exquisite photographs” — that made me expecially proud. The reviewers at PW even took the rare step of publishing this image (only viewable in their print edition): When I first sent the book to the publısher there was…
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Many thanks to trade reviewer Kirkus Reviews for enthusiasm and praise for Dining with al-Qaeda in their 12 December 2009 assessment! British journalist Pope (Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World, 2005, etc.) shares deeply engaged dispatches from the Middle East hotspots he visited during his long career. The author organizes the…
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A first formal review of Dining with al-Qaeda from Publishers’ Weekly — topping the bill in the non-fiction review section on 23 November 2009! The 30 years Pope (Sons of the Conquerors) has spent living and traveling in the Middle East, from a 1980 visit as an Oxford student through a decade-long stint as a…
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In the early 1980s, Jon Randal‘s book on the Lebanon war was passed around young correspondents and aid workers like a sacred text. It is one of the first accounts of the misadventures of the Middle East to give a fair voice to all sides and satisfactorily explain what really goes on. In later years…
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Mariane Pearl, widow of Danny Pearl, my late colleague killed by al-Qaeda in Karachi in 2002, has read Dining with al-Qaeda. It was very important to me that she felt I did justice to the subject of what it was like to meet jihadi folk — and that I had talked realistically through what I…
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I first met Morton Abramowitz as a young reporter when I went to interview him as ambassador to Turkey in the early 1990s, little realizing that I would join the organization that he subsequently co-founded — International Crisis Group. Abramowitz has had a hand in almost everything impacting Turkey and the Middle East in recent…
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I first met Tony Horwitz when he was a Wall Street Journal correspondent, determined to see every inch of every border with Iraq to test a theory about sanctions against that country during the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. We spent a week bumping up and down mountain roads along the Iraq-Turkey border together, and…
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I’ve long been a fan of Azadeh Moaveni‘s writing, and especially enjoyed her book Lipstick Jihad, which tells about her Iranian-American childhood and her attempts to return to Iran. So I was really happy that she agreed to endorse Dining with al-Qaeda: “Hugh Pope’s deftly told account of 30 years in the Middle East recounts…
Hugh Pope 