Customer Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating description of a fascinating place.
Comment: Bradley lived in Saudi Arabia, in an ordinary home, not in a foreigners' compound. As far as was possible he lived as an ordinary inhabitant and not an expat. This gave him an opportunity to see parts of the country that many others don't see.
There is probably no other country on earth that is so closed to foreign cultures, or that takes such care to control its citizen's moral and cultural lives. Nor is there any country that is so unique: quite different from all other Islamic societies, not just the rest of the world. Bradley gives an interesting, but necessarily personal, take on the country.
Customer Rating:
Summary: All you need to know about Saudi Arabia's complex society
Comment: There's very little around about Saudi Arabia, a country that most people have a very faint idea about, and that even people who have lived there (such as myself) often fail to understand.
Bradley, out of his two-odd year experience as "the only credited western journalist" in the Magic Kingdom, offers a memorable, sober and impressive recap of the Saudi society. From the excesses of private life to the censorship that sends so many journalists behind bars, from drug abuse and homosexuality to the innate hospitability of the Saudi people, he criss-crosses the country in an ideal journey targeted to make you understand the complexity of this incredible and vastly unknown society, on whose developments will depend the stability of the Middle East, and hence of the whole world in the coming years.
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