NONFICTION - March 3, 1991

THE TURBULENT GULF by Liesl Graz (St. Martin’s: $29.95; 302 pp.). This study of Persian Gulf politics is impressively probing and practical, no doubt because the newspapers that Liesl Graz writes for--the Economist and Financial Times of London--are read by people who often have large sums riding on the region’s tides and thus little patience for the jingoism that sometimes passes for reporting in America. These readers need to know which direction those tides are flowing, and Graz seems uniquely able to tell them because of her acute awareness of the Bedouin traditions lying behind the Gulf nations’ modern Western facade. Like her fellow journalists, Graz is unclear about statistics--how many died in the Iran-Iraq war, how much aid the monarchs gave Saddam Hussein to fight Iran--but unlike them, she is able to trace the Arabs’ sometimes-puzzling behavior to their nomadic roots.