Neil MacFarquhar’s book, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah ­Wishes You a Happy Birthday is reviewed in The New York Times. The review, by a former Times correspondent whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the groundbreaking for KAUST, is positive on a book that looks at the nascent movements toward democracy and reform in the Arab world. This looks like another book I’m going to have to get to do my own review.

Princes and Imams
THANASSIS CAMBANIS

In this engaging and fact-filled reporter’s memoir, Neil MacFarquhar successfully walks a fine line. He offers something fresh and unexpected for readers steeped in a decade of news reports about suicide bombers, absolutist imams and tyrannical despots. Yet he never forgets that most of those readers care about the subject only because they have already decided, perhaps simplistically, that they are under threat from the Arab or Muslim world. He nods to the prejudices about Middle Eastern fanatics and then sets off merrily to dispel them.

Like many of us, MacFarquhar desperately wants to make sense of some burning questions: How come the flood of petrodollars in the Persian Gulf has produced so little intellectual innovation and sustainable development? How can political reform and economic liberalization coexist with resurgent Islamism? Can the United States act as a force for change in Iran and the Arab countries, or has it lost its leverage? “The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah ­Wishes You a Happy Birthday” is MacFarquhar’s effort to write a funny (yet penetrating) account about real Arabs — and a few Persians — struggling against long odds to bring their societies into the modern age.
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