The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday

For foreign correspondents who write books explaining their beats to American readers, one of the greatest challenges seems to be pruning and arranging an unwieldy bouquet of anecdotes into an organized, thoughtful narrative.  In this book, former NYTimes Cairo bureau chief Neil MacFarquhar does so nicely.  He doesn't skimp on revealing or humorous images-like Saudi women lifting their veils in a waiting room to get a better look at an Oprah segment he calls "Hunks Building Houses" until a grumbling man changes the channel- but for the most part they're arranged logically around easily identified themes.  The primary questions are why democracy has such a difficult time taking root in the Arab world and, to a lesser extent, how the United States could encourage it.  The first part of the book doesn't really address these issues, focusing instead on MacFarquhar's childhood on an oil company's compound in pre-Qadafi Libya.  During this period there don't seem to be too many Libyans involved in the industry that would transform their country, and MacFarquhar has almost no contact with any.  In a way, the presence of the compound in Libya and its insulation from the rest of the country until the dramatic moment when most of its residents have to be evacuated embodies a lot of the missteps and misunderstandings between the United States and the Arab world; and this book skillfully tries to illuminate them.