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Edition: |
pb |
| ISBN: |
9781593762568 |
| Publisher: |
Soft Skull Press |
| Release Date: |
2009-12-03 |
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ITEM OVERVIEW
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, and all of their families. He chronicles 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 underage orphan trash-collectors in Cairo.
The more he witnessed, the less he understood, and 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 favored the stories that would be sure to confirm the popularly held, oversimplified beliefs of westerners.
A tale of disillusionment and self-examination set in the world-s most headline-grabbing regions, 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.
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