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    People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East
    Unavailable
    People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East
    Unavailable
    People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East
    Ebook251 pages4 hours

    People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East

    By Joris Luyendijk

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A war correspondent’s bestselling, “commanding . . . eye-opening account” of five years on the Middle East frontlines (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
     
    In 1998, Joris Luyendijk was stationed just outside of Cairo. It wasn’t for his journalism skills. It was because he was fluent in Arabic. What followed—from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the post 9/11 war in Iraq—would be literal trial-by-fire for the young untested reporter. What he had going for him was his ability to communicate.
     
    Determined to cover the conflicts from the inside, Luyendijk spoke with stone throwers and staunch terrorists, taxi drivers, civil servants and professors, victims and aggressors, and all of their families. He chronicled first-hand experiences of dictatorship, occupation, fear, resilience, jubilation, and community. But the more Luyendijk witnessed, the less he understood. He became increasingly aware of the yawning gap between what he witnessed on the ground and what was being reported by 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 favored stories were those that would be sure to confirm the popularly held, oversimplified beliefs of the outside world.
     
    “Disturbing, thought-provoking, and ultimately profound,” People Like Us shatters our perceptions of what we’re led to believe—a filtered, altered, and manipulated image of reality in the Middle East that has become a wholly designed theater of war for the western audience (Norman Solomon, author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateSep 9, 2009
    ISBN9781593763541
    Unavailable
    People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East
    Author

    Joris Luyendijk

    Joris Luyendijk was born December 30th 1971 in the Netherlands. His first three books are about the Middle East, the most successful of which appeared in English as Hello Everybody. Joris Luyendijk is currently living in London, having completed an anthropological investigation into how bankers in the City can live with themselves for the Guardian, now a book, Swimming with Sharks, My Journey into the World of the Bankers. (Faber)

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    Reviews for People Like Us

    4/5

    5 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This is a brilliant book about Luyendijk's experiences as a journalist in the middle east. I now know things I'm not sure I really wanted to know. Bottom line: the media controls big parts of the wars and dictatorships in the middle east. Of course I knew this, but this book illustrates it with painful examples. I hope it will get translated into many languages.
    • 3/5
      After finishing this book I felt a bit unsatisfied. Luyendijk's criticism isn't really constructive at all. He doesn't even try to find solutions for the problems he writes about. And that leaves this book a bit lacking.
    • 5/5
      The book is about how the media give a view on the Middle East that is based on image forming instead of facts. Because most of the countries there are run by more or less dictatorial leaders, you can't get real data on how people's real views on something is. To avoid admitting that, the media use our prejudices to give a view on the Middle East.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)
    • 3/5
      Verplichte lectuur voor elke journalist. Natuurlijk eerder eenzijdig, maar Luyendijk maakt er wel zijn punt mee duidelijk. Zowel interessant als kritiek op de gangbare journalistiek, als introductie tot het Midden-Oosten. Vooral in het nawoord, waarin Luyendijk antwoordt op de kritiek die er intussen is gekomen, komt de auteur iets meer ter zake. Blijft wel de terechte opmerking dat Luyendijk de lat voor de journalistiek erg hoog legt: de waarheid vind je er niet, voor wie die illusie nog had.