This book contributes to the growing fields of ethnic studies and military thought; it is also of interest to students of the contemporary Middle East.

This book is essentially the third volume on the history of British Petroleum (BP) from 1901 to 1975, which the author has tried to present on its own, to be read with or without reference to the previous two volumes. It deals with three phases of BP's developments during 1950–75, starting with the 1950–54 period of Iranian oil-nationalization crisis, the 1955–70 phase of growth and internationalization, and finally the 1974–75 takeover by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The author has been BP's “official historian” for years, and the company's “History Committee” has approved the present study.

I must admit that when I first read this book, I didn't like it. As the footnotes quickly indicate, the bulk of the research derives from secondary sources, either from the Israeli and Western press or from FBIS/WNC translations from the Arabic press. Virtually no interview material is used—strange, indeed, when one considers that the author lives within an hour of almost all the major political actors discussed in the study. And although some reference is made to public-opinion polls, it is disappointing that greater use has not been made of the voluminous survey data collected by the Center for Palestine Research and Studies and the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center—the richest such troves in the Arab world.

In recent years, there has been a plethora of commentary, at times revised daily, regarding the nature of factional conflicts and the marketplace of ideas that elite competition has brought into the open in Iran. Much less analyzed or thoughtfully reflected upon are the kinds of subtle changes that have occurred in different layers of the society that allow Iranians to breathe meaning into, and make sense of, the fast pace of changes at the political top, and to fuel those changes. Precisely how Iranians have fashioned, and are fashioning, their daily life—or, as Adelkhah puts it, “reinventing their modern life”—is the tantalizing focus of this very interesting, albeit rather scattered and cumbersome, book about Iranian culture and politics.

The debate about the Internet revolution has been marked by a double dystopia. One comes from the Scandinavian cybernauts who are far more extensively wired than their West European, or even North American, counterparts. In “Digital Arrogance,” the Swedish media scholar Andreas Kitzmann laments that the global expansion of multimedia technology and cyber-culture “is motivated not by the promise of human emancipation and enlightenment but by fantasies of power and complete control.” The South Asian cultural critic Ziauddin Sardar is even more harsh. “Cyberspace is social engineering of the worst kind. . . . The supposed democracy of cyberspace,” he writes in Cyberfutures (1996), “only hands control more effectively back to a centralized elite, the ideology of the free citizen making everyone oblivious to the more enduring structures of control.”

In an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation, Talal Nizameddin, now a lecturer at Haigazian University in Beirut, discusses the evolution of Russian foreign policy toward the Middle East under Boris Yeltsin from the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 until 1997. The book, based in part on extensive interviews in Moscow, seeks to show how Russian policy evolved from what the author describes as the “radical pro-West” view of Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev in the early 1990s to the more nationalist view of Yevgeny Primakov in the mid- to late 1990s. In general, Nizameddin succeeds in his task, although his failure to evaluate critically some of the comments given to him by his interviewees in Moscow, such as Vitaly Naumkin, and the clearly anti-United States and anti-Israel perspective with which the book is written detract from the value of the study.

“We Greeks invented tragedy. So we are fated to act it out. But why it should be only the Greeks of Cyprus, I don't know” (Greek Cypriot student, Limassol, 1993). “When bad things happen to us we think someone else intended them. When it's good things, we think we did them. That's what we learned [in an intercommunal conflict-resolution exercise]. But it's true!” (Turkish Cypriot student, Nicosia/Lefkoşe, 1997). Brendan O'Malley and Ian Craig ably relate a well-researched account of the division of Cyprus, focusing on the deliberations and political events that presaged partition in 1974. Their purpose is not to draw lessons for policy today, but to explain and to fix blame—and, at times, credit—for the division of the island.

In an era of instantaneous communication and ubiquitous media the global public is regularly invited to witness history in the making, as the expression goes, through newspaper accounts and broadcasts of events marked with special significance. In the Middle East and elsewhere, history is said to record the fate of nations that at times is unfolding before our eyes and ears, with the accuracy of claims resting on evidence to be observed or recovered in period documents and artifacts. What emerges supposedly is a narrative whose eventual uncertainties can be attributed to information gaps, inadequate archives, and difficulties in identifying or authenticating sources.

Based on Professor Özbudun's lectures at Bilkent University, this book is at once compact, highly readable, and very insightful. Unlike much current literature on Turkey, the analysis is set in a broad and informed comparative context. Turkey, the author points out, has been left out of comparative political studies, particularly those encompassing the Middle East and southern Europe, in which arguably it could (or should) have been included. Scholarly neglect thus reflects real-world politics: Turkey falls between two worlds, one of which it once largely controlled, the other to which it currently aspires to belong. This lacuna is one of the factors that persuaded Özbudun to publish this volume.

Stefania Pandolfo's Impasse of the Angels is a fascinating study of a Moroccan society as it defines itself in the present-day post-colonial Maghrib. Starting at a point of crisis for the people in question (the move from the old village to the new), the author artfully presents the understanding of identity (personal, social, regional, and even national) as precisely the result of such conflicts, both historical and present: the fracturing and reunification, wounding and healing, produced by mutually opposed and yet interacting processes.

In her pivotal work on Kuwaiti politics, Mary Ann Tétreault provides an “insider's guide” to the private and public spaces in which struggles over communal power are pursued by the government, the Parliament, and the people of Kuwait. Tétreault is careful to call her text “Stories of Democracy,” as she realizes the reflexive nature of what democracy means at different periods in history (before oil, after oil, under Iraqi occupation, in post-Liberation Kuwait); for different people in Kuwait (women, the merchants, government officials, tribal leaders, service politicians, opposition leaders); and in different contexts (the mosque, the diwaniyya or men's social club, the civic association, Parliament, the government). With this in mind, she argues that “democracy” is a “concept that ‘moves' depending on one's assumptions” (p. 3). Her basic message is that Kuwaiti politics resembles the politics of the Greek city-state, and she relies on various forms of Aristotelian comparison to explore this concept. Moreover, Tétreault illustrates that much of Kuwaiti politics resembles a high-stakes soap opera. For example, she calls the bad debt crisis “one of the longest running soap operas in Kuwaiti politics” (p. 164). In Chapter 4, she labels Kuwaiti politics “a family romance, whose grip on political actors constrains their choices” (p. 67). Toward the end of her text in chapter 8, Tétreault combines these metaphors when she observes that in the city-state that is Kuwait, politics are “the product of a domestic public life that seems all too often like life in a large and contentious family” (p. 206).

The surge in foreign direct investment (FDI)—investment with managerial control by the foreign investor, usually a multinational corporation—has been the major driver of globalization in the past two decades and the accelerator of economic development in many developing countries. It has, however, bypassed Turkey. By all relevant relative measures found in the United Nations' annual World Investment Report, Turkey has failed to attract much FDI.

As neither the reviewer nor the author contacted me before reporting critically on my work during the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis, I appreciate IJMES's offer to state my position. Subsequently, I have been in touch with both James Goode and Ofira Seliktar. The latter told me 1. She made a decision not to conduct any interviews because interviewees are apt to offer self-serving or faulty memories and because she might face “threats.” 2. Although she felt sorry for the way I was treated in the book, she seemed to place greater blame on the academics advising the State Department who put forward the “reigning academic consensus” (New Left and moralpolitik) that captured Foreign Service minds (especially mine) and led to destructive policies. I'll bet that few Middle East Studies Association members realized they could have such power over policy-making.

The nub of Richard J. Antoun's interesting article (IJMES 32:441–63) is that the scholarly attention given to formal associations and institutions in the Middle East has overshadowed those implicit or vernacular processes of cooperation and reconciliation that actually constitute the core of “civil society,” and that are adapting to such changes as transnational migration and telecommunications. This warning against ethnocentrism from such a distinguished ethnographer of Jordan is timely and valuable. However, some dimensions are missing from Antoun's analysis, and maybe his case is overstated.

Jonathan Benthall's stimulating comment on my essay on civil society and tribal process in Jordan has five specific criticisms: I pay no attention to gender; I underestimate the importance of mass media; I neglect the fact that Jordan is an aid economy with the implied necessity of finding formal organizations through which to funnel spending; I emphasize the importance of kinship ties, although kinship puts a brake on the country's progress and on meritocracy; and I emphasize the importance of tribal process when it is precisely that process that reinforces reactionary trends. I shall briefly address these matters, then focus on the issues underlying our differences. In that way, I hope to advance the discourse.