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"In People Like Us, Joris Luyendijk tells the story of his five years as a reporter in the Middle East. Extremely young for a correspondent but fluent in Arabic, he spoke with stone throwers and terrorists, taxi drivers and professors, victims and aggressors, students and families. He chronicled first-hand experiences of dictatorship, occupation, terror, and war. His stories cast light on a number of major crises, from the Iraq War to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with less-reported issues such as orphans collecting trash on the streets of Cairo." "Yet the more he witnessed, the less he understood, and he explains here how he became increasingly aware of the yawning gap between what he saw on the ground and what was later reported in the media. As a correspondent, he was privy to a multitude of narratives with conflicting implications, and he saw over and over again that the media favors the stories that are sure to confirm the popularly held, oversimplified beliefs of westerners." "People Like Us - which has become a bestseller in its native Holland - deploys powerful examples, leavened with humor, to demonstrate the ways in which the media gives us a filtered, altered, and manipulated image of reality in the Middle East."--Jacket.… (more)
User reviews
The author was a correspondent in Egypt, Libanon an Israel from 1998 to 2003 and describes how he did his job there and how odd it was to report things that he sometimes knew nothing about.
This book not only made me think about how I usually watch the news. It also made me think about how life was in Iraq when Saddam was still at power. I used to think that they were better off then: although they lived under one of the worst dictators, at least they knew how to avoid trouble; in present Iraq anyone can get killed where ever they are. Since I've read the book I question that opinion. The description of Iraq under Saddam (Luyendijk visited Iraq a couple of times) was scaring me. I can't imagine how it's like to live in a dictatorship, but sitting on the couch reading the book was terrifying enough, let alone living it.
I hope the book will be translated to English (and I hope there are Dutch readers who would like to read this book)