Power, Faith, and Fantasy

November 20, 2006
In this engaging if unbalanced survey, the author of the acclaimed Six Days of War
finds continuity in U.S. relations with the Middle East from the early 19th-century war against the Barbary pirates to today's Iraq war. As America's power grew, he contends, strategic considerations became complicatedby the region's religious significance, especially to the Protestant missionaries whose interests drove U.S. policyin the 19th century and who championed a Jewish state in Palestine long before the Zionist movement took up that cause. Meanwhile, Oren notes, Americans' romantic fantasies about the Muslim world (as expressed in Mideast-themed movies) have repeatedly run aground on stubborn, squalid realities, most recently in the Iraq fiasco. Oren dwells on the pre-WWII era, when U.S.-Mideast relations were of little significance. The postwar period, when these relations were central to world affairs, gets shoehorned into 127 hasty pages, and the emphasis on continuity gives short shrift to the new and crucial role of oil in U.S. policy making. Oren's treatment views this history almost entirely through American eyes; the U.S. comes off as usually well intentioned and idealistic, if often confused and confounded by regional complexities. Oren's is a fluent, comprehensive narrative of two centuries of entanglement, but it's analytically disappointing. Photos.

July 30, 2007
Following up his acclaimed study of the Six-Day War, historian Oren analyzes America's 200-plus–year involvement in the Middle East, from battling Barbary pirates to toppling Saddam Hussein. Dietz, one of AudioFile
magazine's Best Voices of the Century, with a measured, leisurely reading style, turns in another solid performance. Dietz comes from the classic school of readers, sounding like an action movie–trailer narrator in a more contemplative mood. His almost brusque masculine swagger is highly appropriate for Oren's tale of American misadventure in the Middle East, compounded in equal parts of the three titular components. Counterintuitively for so long an audiobook, Dietz's tortoise-like performance adds to, rather than detracts from, Oren's prose, with Dietz's careful pace giving Oren's carefully researched tome an added measure of dignified wisdom. Available as a Norton hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 20, 2006).