People Like Us

"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, students and families. He chronicled 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 orphans collecting trash on the streets of Cairo." "Yet the more he witnessed, the less he understood, and he explains here how 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 favors the stories that are sure to confirm the popularly held, oversimplified beliefs of westerners." "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."--Jacket.