The Gertrude Bell Jar

Martyrs' Day/Michael Kelly

Martyrs' Day: Chronicle of a Small War by Michael Kelly.
A collection of essays and reports by the American journalist (he was an editor of The Atlantic at the time of his death while covering the more recent war in Iraq) about the Gulf War. He ignored the pool reporter thing and went pretty much everywhere during the war; Baghdad before the outbreak of the war, Israel during the SCUD attacks, at the front with the Egyptian Army during the ground war, Kuwait City after liberation, Kurdish areas of northern Iraq after non-liberation there, etc. Some of it is very compelling stuff; the chapter on the occupation of Kuwait City is particularly troubling in the wake of Abu Ghraib and stirring up of old reports about the Stanford Prison experiment and whatnot. A both enjoyable and depressing read.

Price of Honor/Jan Goodwin

Price of Honor : Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World by Jan Goodwin.

A journalistic account of the status of women in a number of Islamic countries, highlighting changes that have occurred as Islamization advances, along with an interesting chapter on Wahhabist recruitment in the U.S. The opening chapters, giving an overview of Islam as a religion and the history of the Islamic world, are a disaster, apparently cobbled together from clip files and never checked for basic coherence or context, so that the story contradicts itself from one page to the next. Skip directly ahead to the country chapters, which contain many first-person and uncensored accounts by ordinary Muslim women which are more precious than gold in their rarity, interviews with various notables like Queen Noor, and female Islamist propagandists like Laili Zikria Helms, the late, unlamented Taliban regime's female publicist in America. This book makes things seem much worse for women in Islamic countries than some other accounts I've read, the chapter on Pakistan being particularly hair-raising.

Nine Parts of Desire/Geraldine Brooks

Nine Parts of Desire : the Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks.

Brooks is an Australian journalist who catalogs here her experiences and interviews with Muslim women, from the post-Gulf War period up to 1995 in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Gaza. It's the sort of book that makes you want to read about a hundred other books (and is in fact the first one I read on this subject); the data collected here are suggestive of a great many things, but the personal and anecdotal nature of the book prevents it from being authoritative in any way. You do get a sense of the diversity of the style of observant religious life in various Islamic countries (and of how--mostly Saudi-funded--"Islamization" has exerted a homogenizing influence), and of the diversity of opinion among women about this trend. Warning: Brooks' discussion of Islamic theology and history is not entirely reliable, in part because she doesn't distinguish between conventional and feminist interpretations, and in part because the incompleteness of her account (this is not primarily a history book, after all) can be somewhat misleading, particularly with reference to the origin of the Shia/Sunni split.