Usually, I title my post with the title of the book that I am reviewing.  Today, that gives us a rather long headline!

The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East by Neil MacFarquhar continues my travel theme of late. Last time, a trip through the Grand Canyon, this time a sweeping trip from Algeria to Iran.  MacFarquhar spent his early childhood on a compound for oil employees in Libya.  While he was relatively isolated from the local people and culture, those years left a deep impression.  As an adult, he has devoted his career to the region, learning Arabic and working as a journalist for the Associated Press and the New York Times. His book begins with his childhood and closely follows his own chronology through the first half of the book.  In the second half, he chooses six reformers in six countries.  By following each person’s story, MacFarquhar highlights the main impediments to democracy in the region.

Since he centers his writing on his own story and the stories of specific individuals, MacFarquhar is able to delve into the region more intimately.  For the most part, he avoids emphasizing the violence that grabs our attention in news headlines.  Instead, he attempts to capture what day to day life is like for ordinary people. His early chapters on Libya are quite insightful, and timely, given the recent controversy concerning the man imprisoned in Scotland for the Lockerbie crash.  I also admire how he wove his own memories and desires into his reporting.  Here’s an example from his chapter on Lebanon:

“One favorite picture of my parents captured them out in the town in Beirut, all dolled up and grinning widely.  My father, completely out of character, sports a tux, while my mother is wearing a dark, short-sleeved cocktail dress and a wig that I had never seen before or since.  They are sitting at a dinner table, waiting for the floor show to begin at the Casino du Liban, a low white building still perched on a cliff just north of Beirut.  The glamorous memento had been snapped roughly a year before the Lebanese civil war erupted in April 1975.”

By juxtaposing these snippets of memory and mundane life with the violent milestones of the region’s recent history, MacFarquhar offers a useful analysis of life in the Middle East for those of us who are not familiar with the region’s governments, structures, and customs.  I came away feeling like I know a little more about why the countries of the region seem so mysterious to Americans and why serious change in the region is so difficult.