Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East [Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged] [MP3 CD]

Robin Wright MA (Author), Laural Merlington (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 2008

Robin Wright first landed in the Middle East on October 6, 1973, the day the fourth Middle East war erupted. She has covered every country and most major crises in the region since then, through to the rise of al Qaeda and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. For all the drama of the past, however, the region's most decisive traumas are unfolding today as the Middle East struggles to deal with trends that have already reshaped the rest of the world. And for all the darkness, there is also hope. Some of the emerging trends give cause for greater optimism about the future of the Middle East than at any time since the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948.Dreams and Shadows is an extraordinary tour de horizon of the new Middle East, with on-the-ground reportage of the ideas and movements driving change across the region-and the obstacles they confront. Through the powerful storytelling for which the author is famous, Dreams and Shadows ties together the players and events in Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey, the Gulf states, and the Palestinian territories into a coherent vision of what lies ahead.A marvelous field report from the center of the storm, the book is animated by the characters whose stories give the region's transformation its human immediacy and urgency. It is also rich with the history that brought us to this point. It is a masterpiece of the reporter's art and a work of profound and enduring insight.At the end, Wright offers perspective on the United States' most ambitious and costly foreign policy initiative since the rebuilding of Europe after World War II. The stakes are far greater than winning the war on terrorism, stabilizing Iraq, or achieving a lasting Arab-Israeli peace. Transforming the greater Middle East is the last great political challenge of the modern era. Yet the early burst of activity in a region long stagnant is already becoming one of the first grand surprises of the twenty-first century.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Despite having lost several of her friends in the 1983 US Embassy bombing in Beirut, Wright (The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran) is guardedly optimistic for the Middle East's future: "a generation after the Beirut bombing, Islamic extremism is no longer the most important, interesting, or dynamic force in the Middle East." Her observations, of a "budding culture of change"-even, perhaps, a "renaissance"-are bolstered by platinum credentials; for more than 30 years, Wright has been covering the region for major American publications including The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly and Foreign Affairs. She illuminates her assessment with stories of the new "voices in the region" pushing for a more open, democratic society: activists, reformers, political leaders and ordinary citizens (like an Egyptian "middle-aged soccer mom" so outraged to learn of female government agents beating female demonstrators that she became an activist). Wright also tackles the big targets; though a staunch supporter of Israel, Wright sees the potential for reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, in an effort to maintain democracy in Palestine, as a positive harbinger of change for the entire region. Further interviews, anecdotes, a crystalline sense of the area's multifarious history and a clear message-practical, progressive change requires "sorting out the past or at least trying to move beyond it"-make this a vital, compelling and surprisingly uplifting piece of reporting.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Wright has covered the Middle East since 1973. Highly acclaimed author of The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran (2000), she brings a long perspective to the current challenges faced by the U.S.—and the world—in the Middle East. Drawing on interviews with Palestinian and Lebanese militants, Egyptian and Moroccan activists, Syrian and Iranian reformers, Wright offers a broad perspective on the issues facing particular nations and the broader area. The interviews add an immediacy and sense of human urgency to conflicts in a region often rendered from great political and emotional distance. Wright examines the historic and current factors that add to the complexity, including unfulfilled promises of democracy, the rise of al-Qaeda, oil riches, globalization, and the Internet. She concludes with an analysis of how the U.S. invasion in Iraq has impacted the region as well as prospects for democratic government and cultural tolerance there. Readers interested in a broader perspective on conflict in the Middle East will appreciate Wright’s absorbing, insightful book. --Vanessa Bush --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• MP3 CD
• Publisher: Tantor Media; Unabridged,MP3 - Unabridged CD edition (March 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400155975
• ISBN-13: 978-1400155972
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,722,582 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robin Wright has reported from more than 140 countries on six continents for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, TIME magazine, The Atlantic, The Sunday Times of London, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, CBS News and many others.
Wright has also been a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Yale, Duke, Stanford, the Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the University of California at Santa Barbara.

She is the recipient of the United Nations Correspondents' Association Gold Medal for coverage of international affairs. The American Academy of Diplomacy selected Wright as the journalist of the year for her "distinguished reporting and analysis of international affairs." She also won the National Press Club award for diplomatic reporting, the National Magazine Award for her reportage from Iran in The New Yorker, and the Overseas Press Club Award for "best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and initia¬tive" for coverage of African wars. She was the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant.

She has been a television commentator on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN and MSNBC programs, including "Meet the Press," "Face the Nation," "This Week," "Nightline," the PBS Newshour, "Frontline," "Charlie Rose," "Larry King Live," "Washington Week in Review," "The Colbert Report," and HBO's "Real Time."

Wright is the author of "Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East" (2008), which The New York Times and The Washington Post both selected as one of the most notable books of the year. She was the editor of "The Iran Primer: Power, Politics and U.S. Policy" (2010), which brought together 50 of the world's top Iran experts. Her other books include "The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran" (2000), which was selected as one of the 25 most memorable books of the year by the New York Library Association, "Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam" (2001), "Flashpoints: Promise and Peril in a New World" (1991), and "In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade" (1989).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, not great, July 25, 2008

By 

Enjolras (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (Hardcover)

I had read Robin Wright's "The Last Great Revolution" about Iran and was excited to buy this book. However, I felt it was a bit too much of a chef's tour. Some of the anecdotes were interesting, even inspiring, but overall I felt the book was a bit too shallow. Wright recalls a few interviews here and there, but we don't get the depth of what we get in her prior book. It's one thing to use interviews and anecdotes in pursuit of a well-argued thesis, but another just to do so to give us a flavor of the Middle East. This makes much of the book a forgettable blur rather than a true learning experience.

Having said that, I thought her chapter on Iran in this book was by far the best. And if you do want a "chef's tour" or sampling of the Middle East, this book does do that well. I hope Wright expands her prior book on Iran and updates it, since she covers Iran very well.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A reporter of the best kind, April 21, 2008

By 

Brian Griffith (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (Hardcover)

For three decades Robin Wright has worked in the Middle East as the best kind of reporter -- a messenger who really listens to people and conveys their messages straight. In this book she draws on a vast network of people who trust her to convey the real experience of Middle Easterners struggling for a better future. She introduces numerous local heroes from Morocco to Iran, who have risked themselves standing up to despotic rulers. Where the West once supported conservative Muslim rulers against Communists, Wright finds that many of the strongest voices for fairness and liberty are socialists or communists. Where the West has backed Muslim autocrats against Islamists, she finds a new wave of popular movements for religious values have become the strongest challengers to autocracy. Wright honestly conveys the difficulties and courage of these activists. She also conveys their despair over the destructive role of US interventionism in the region. As Syrian dissident Yassin Haj Saleh puts it, "However opposed Syrians are to our own regime, they now distrust the Americans more".


I think this is the kind of direct dialogue with local leaders that we need most from our news professionals.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars America's Dreams and Shadows..., September 28, 2009

By 

John P. Jones III (Albuquerque, NM, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (Hardcover)

Robin Wright has been reporting on the Middle East for over 35 years, interviewing a wide-spectrum of the political players of the area. She did get off the "beaten path," finding ascendant political figures on her own, and even going to Iran so that she could walk into "Kurdistan" prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. One of the best portraits is of the charismatic leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Nasrallah, whom she concludes is not only a local leader but also a regional "Che Guevera." Two other enlightening interviews, which are generally conducted over a period of time, are of politically active women in Morocco, Fatima Mernissi, and Latifa Jbabdi, whom the author "brought to life", certainly for this reader. In Egypt, Wright highlighted the work of Ghada Shahbender and the organization she helped found, "We're watching you"; an organization, as its name implies, that monitors and reports on the activities of the powerful, certainly including efforts to monitor electoral fraud. And in Syria she presents portraits on true "profiles in courage," or sheer obduracy, in the persons of Riad al Turk, Yassin Haj Saleh, Samara al Khalil, all of whom spent numerous years in prison, in a country with one of the most repressive governments of the region. I found the background on the Assad assassination attempt, as well as the background and origins of both Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani in Iran particularly illuminating, and certainly relevant today. The focus of her reportage are interviews of the individuals promoting change, barely inside, or completely outside the political establishment; rarely is there an interview with the actual leader of the country, who might articulate their own interests in change.

In terms of books by reporters, Wright largely avoids the `cut and paste' style, with its inevitable redundancies, though her description of Qatar in the early part of the book, twice, would be the exception. She also tends towards annoying "People magazine" style descriptions of people, such as "...wearing a deep-red polo shirt."

Structurally though, I believe the book is profoundly flawed. The book is subtitled "The Future of the Middle East," yet two of the most essential countries of the area are omitted, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, as Wright acknowledges in her introduction, and for reasons that do not seem to be very convincing. Furthermore, relying on the deficiencies in geographic knowledge of many Americans, she places Morocco in "the Middle East."

Wright is very much an "establishment" reporter, as evidenced by her comment on page 409: "In October 2006, I made my fourth postwar trip to Iraq with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice." The question that others, particularly more independent-minded reporters have raised and this book helps answer is: To be invited on the plane, what sort of self-censorship must be practiced, particularly during the days of the Bush administration? In terms of other countries, be it Syria or Morocco, Wright repeatedly covers the fact that political dissidents are tortured in prison, and are all too often held without charge. A point she rightly makes. But Wright manages an entire chapter on "Iraq and the United States" without ever mentioning Abu Ghraib. Likewise, Guantanamo is nowhere in the Index, yet both places have had a profound impact on America's relationship with this region. Another litmus test of self-censorship is the CIA's coup of 1953 in Iran which overthrew their democratically elected government - not because, in any way the country was a threat to the United States; rather it was all about denying the Iranian people a greater benefit from their oil resources. Stephen Kinzer's book, "All the Shah's Men" covers this event well. Wright does mention the coup twice, a paragraph each in two different chapters. In one of those paragraphs she relates Iranian upset to the "radicalism of their youth." This coup is not an end all, but for an understanding of the American-Iranian relationship, as well as the Iranian world outlook, the coup merits more than passing mention, it is the starting point - the comparison with a reverse situation, how Americans would feel if Iran had overthrown Dwight Eisenhower, and installed their own "man" would greatly facilitate American understanding. Although she does not cover Israel, she does have a chapter on the Palestinians, and conforms to the establishment press "style book" that always starts with the Palestinians doing something outrageous, and then the Israelis respond. Only once did she reverse this, inferring that the attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 might have been "payback" for the assassination of the predecessor of Nasrallah as head of Hezbollah. She mentions "targeted assassinations" on several occasions, but never explains why it is in quotes, and, of course, never ties it to terrorism.

The most startling error in the book is in the last chapter, the one on Iraq and the United States, where on page 410, she says: "The most ambitious and costly U.S. intervention since the end of World War II felt like it was in free fall." An error at so many different levels, because you don't have to worry about the "lessons" of Vietnam, the ones the first George Bush felt he had overcome in the war of 1991, if you completely "airbrush" Vietnam out of history. The Iraq, Afghanistan, and interventions in other Middle East countries may yet exceed the 58,000 plus dead on the wall in Washington, DC, who died over a 16 year period, and at a cost in economic terms, on an inflation adjusted basis, that still exceeds current war expenditures in the Islamic world, not to mention the social turmoil in the United States--but we are still not there yet. It should be no surprise that Vietnam is not in the index, and certainly not "lesson learned there."

In one of the classic works on Vietnam, Graham Greene's "The Quiet American," the author said of Alden Pyle, the CIA operative who was modeled on Kermit Roosevelt, the real life CIA operative who was responsible for the 1953 Iranian coup: "He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance." Greene saw the links between American mistakes in Southeast Asia and Southwest Asia. Shouldn't we all?

In her prologue Wright explains that the title to her book was derived from Musafa Kemal Ataturk, the "modernizer" of Turkey, who said: "Neither sentiment nor illusion must influence our policy. Away with dreams and shadows!" Good advice for the United States also, and how we perceive both our interests and the Middle East. Wright used an epigraph from Riad Al Turk, the Syrian dissident who said that: "Democracy cannot be brought on the back of a tank." Indeed, by setting a better example, we could recover the Shahbenders who states, as quoted by Wright at the very end, that: "Most Egyptians now raise their eyebrows and speak quite sarcastically about American democracy." Away with our own dreams and shadows.