BAGHDAD WITHOUT A MAP AND OTHER MISADVENTURES...

BAGHDAD WITHOUT A MAP AND OTHER MISADVENTURES IN ARABIA, Tony Horwitz (Plume: $10.). An award-winning reporter, Horwitz offers his often comic impressions of Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Dubai and Sudan. As a free-lance journalist, he roamed the Middle East looking for news stories Western journals would buy, but seems to have been more adept at finding the story behind the headlines, and giving the reader a picture of the daily lives of ordinary people in countries in crisis. He samples the intoxicating sensation of chewing qat, a national pastime in Yemen, but sobers up when he discovers how appalling easy it is to buy weapons of mass destruction there--at bargain prices ($20 for a grenade, $5 for a bayonet, $120 for an assault rifle). “It go bang, it go boom, we buy,” a shopkeeper cheerfully informs him. Alternately bemused and annoyed, he observes Moamar Kadafi’s agents bungle a press junket intended to disprove American charges that he was manufacturing chemical weapons. Watching the demonstrations in Tehran that surrounded the funeral of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Horwitz savors the irony of protesters pausing to chat amicably with a Jewish-American journalist before resuming their cries of “Death of the United States.” In a new epilogue, the author revisits Baghdad, which remains filled with monuments to Saddam Hussein’s monomaniacal regime, despite the damage inflicted by Operation Desert Storm.