Suzy Hansen

What struck me at the time, however, was that no other state seemed to incite such revulsion — not arguably similar places such as Connecticut or Pennsylvania or Maryland. Not New York, with its colorful extensions of Long Island and Staten Island. Not remote, strange states like the Dakotas, or Alabama and Mississippi, those humid locales with painful links to our troubled racial history. No place inspires such freely expressed, comic snobbery as does the Armpit of America (New Jersey’s persistent moniker, despite the fact that the vast majority of the state is wooded and pretty, not to mention very wealthy).

“It has an identity crisis,” said Lance Strate, a professor of communications at Fordham University and a contributor to “This Thing of Ours,” a book about “The Sopranos.” “People call it ‘Jersey.’ No one says ‘York’ or ‘Mexico’ or ‘Hampshire.’ The name communicates a sense of disrespect.

“Take Martha Stewart,” he went on. “When she was riding high, she was from Connecticut. Now that she’s been indicted, she’s from Nutley” — New Jersey.

The opening credits of “The Sopranos” embody New Jersey’s physical (and metaphorical) contradictions: Tony drives on the foul Jersey Turnpike, Tony passes ugly, working class towns, Tony ends up at his North Jersey McMansion, resplendent with green grass in a hilly neighborhood. “The Sopranos” has probably had the largest effect on the perception of New Jersey since Bruce Springsteen and Philip Roth. Thirty-five dollar tour buses now venture around Bergen County, showing off the state’s “Sopranos” locations, from the Bada Bing, according to the tour’s Web site, to “the spot where Big Pussy spoke with the FBI.”

In truth, for all the suffering it’s endured since Joe Piscopo’s “Jersey Guy” routine on “Saturday Night Live,” New Jersey hardly needs “The Sopranos” to bring it more glamorous kinds of attention. The place is literally bursting with writers, directors and musicians, all ready to tell the truth, good and bad, about the place. And critics have long pointed out that New Jersey is a rich source of material for them. The late George Plimpton told the New York Times not so long ago that New Jersey’s “habitués are so extraordinary — more than any other state in the East. The mob, great prizefighters, the prisons, the world of Far Hills, the gamblers, the shore, the corridor between Philadelphia and New York — there is this extraordinary framework that the state’s writers have had throughout American history.”

There are too many Jersey books and movies to count. In recent years, we’ve seen Frederick Reiken’s bestselling novel “The Lost Legends of New Jersey,” James Kaplan’s “Two Guys from Verona,” all of Janet Evanovich’s books with her kick-ass Trenton heroine, Helene Stapinski’s “Five Finger Discount,” Lucinda Rosenfeld’s “Why She Went Home.” Gary Krist wrote a book called “The Garden State.” Allen Ginsberg has a poem called “Garden State”; Rick Moody’s first novel was named the same; and this summer, “Scrubs” star turned director Zach Braff lifts the irony-infused title for a Sundance-acclaimed film in which he stars with Natalie Portman. Tom Perrotta, Sam Lipsyte, Kathleen DeMarco, David Gates, Richard Ford, Richard Price, William Carlos Williams, Amiri Baraka — the list goes on.

Add Kevin Smith’s proud “Jersey Trilogy” to Todd Solondz’s suburban misery-fest “Happiness,” and you have a film library of New Jersey convenience stores, malls, Bon Jovi and Camaros, as well as the Jersey of listless suburbs and collective boredom. If we can admit it, these images of New Jersey make up a land we all recognize. As humorist Joel Stein told the New York Times, in an article about the self-consciously Jersey band Fountains of Wayne, “people might make fun of it, but New Jersey is quintessentially American.”

It’s not surprising that one of America’s greatest living writers and one of its best writers about the American experience, Philip Roth, has produced countless books set in New Jersey, from “Goodbye, Columbus” to “American Pastoral” to the forthcoming “The Plot Against America,” in which Roth returns to Newark after a recent hiatus in Massachusetts and New York. Roth has given us the most profound, and widely read, portrayal of the Americanness of New Jersey life — the drudgery of its cities, the clash of ethnicity and race, the yearning to get out and get somewhere better, and even then, the stultification of bourgeois life. David Chase’s “The Sopranos,” with its in-between-classes Italians, offers a variation on that theme.

But what ideas are New Jersey artists — including newly popular bands like Fountains of Wayne with its lovely ode to “Hackensack” and big dreams of stardom far away from there — exporting about their state? About five years ago, back when South Orange native Lauryn Hill was around, a few articles came out suggesting that New Jersey was “in,” or at least, no longer “out.” And every so often another trend story appears, as they surely will again after Braff’s “Garden State” debuts. The Jersey jokes are tired, these stories suggested. The world is a bigger place now — there are far, far worse corners of hell than New Jersey.

But for those of us from New Jersey, who’ve long whined about our inferiority to New York, and thus the world, the reparation has come too late. Jersey natives have long internalized the reputation and outsider status bestowed upon them and mined it for its truths and falsehoods. What it all adds up to is a sort of immigrant-spawned, working-middle-class, disaffected-guy, slighted-by-the-world, poorly dressed sense of authenticity, a myth of one’s own special New Jerseyness, something that’s both unique to the rest of the country and at the heart of it. New Jersey’s writers are in on the Jersey jokes; more than just reclaim them, they’ve taken them someplace new. As Solondz’s character in “Happiness” said, “You know, people are always putting New Jersey down. None of my friends can believe I live here. But that’s because they don’t get it: I’m living in a state of irony.”

It is that very mythology and the creation of it that Tom Perrotta, New Jersey native and author of “Bad Haircut,” “Joe College” and most recently “Little Children” (which takes place in the Boston suburbs, to which he’s since fled), finds so interesting. “I met Junot Diaz [author of 'Drown'] recently,” Perrotta told me. “And he was wearing a ‘New Jersey: Only the strong survive’ T-shirt. It was like some long lost brotherhood for us. There’s some conviction that it’s a place to be perversely proud of.”

Perrotta’s “Joe College” directly deals with this inferiority complex and sense of pride. In the novel, the young narrator Danny experiences a tender transition from working-class Jersey (he helps his father out with his lunch truck, serving office parks) to the wealth and sophistication of Yale University. It’s a universal class crisis, but in this case, something rooted in Jersey kitsch; the woman he’s dating from home is all about blue eye shadow and Springsteen songs (hint, hint). Somehow the trendier styles of perfect vintage dresses, as seen on the Yale girls, never made their way to the Jersey suburbs. And yet it’s hard not to find Danny’s success utterly gratifying. After all, look where Danny came from! Look what fashion horrors he endured! And he made it to Yale!

Ultimately, “The Sopranos” mines these same conflicts — it’s unclear just where Tony is more comfortable, sitting by the pool in his manicured backyard, or at his seedy strip club. The tensions between Carmela and the sophisticated Meadow, off to school at Columbia, referencing literary critics her mother never heard of, beautifully showed how little class differences sometimes have to do with money. In the last few episodes, with Johnny Sack wielding his New York boss status like a bloody club, it’s difficult not to feel the slight from the “big city” once again. At least this time we know fans of the show are feeling it for the first time, too. But what’s clear, from the accents to the clothing, is that Chase intended in “The Sopranos” an unabashed portrayal of the richness of these characters and the New Jersey landscape. The Jersey jokes exist in a more humanized Technicolor, one big, brilliantly fleshed-out stereotype — the guidos eat at crummy roadside diners, they go to therapy, get colitis, drive their cars all the time, wear truly amazing outfits and tell the New York boss, perhaps foolishly, “Fuck you.”

These aren’t new stereotypes. They’re the people who invade New York and Philadelphia via bridge or tunnel, or the hicks down south who wear “Welcome to the Jersey Shore. Now go home!” T-shirts. It’s hard not to get a tad defensive about the whole enterprise, or want to pick and choose which stereotypes are rooted in reality. It’s a challenge for New Jersey writers to find the complexity in a place that is usually glossed over with broad, dismissive strokes. But it’s also possible that in that endeavor, writers have lovingly pushed along the Jersey stereotypes, because in fact, there’s something within them that they hold dear.

Which brings us, inevitably, back to Springsteen. I always assumed that Bruce was New Jersey’s one untouchable — if anyone was on our side, it was he. Everyone loves Bruce, we think, and that makes his home state a lovable place too. Yet, according to my completely random and unofficial survey, Springsteen has a lot to do with both the state’s grungy image and, conversely, Jersey folks’ proud, somewhat beleaguered, gravely voiced perception of who they are.

“People from New Jersey create this Springsteen myth about themselves,” said Sam Lipsyte, author of “Venus Drive,” “The Subject Steve” and the forthcoming “Home Land,” which is about a down-and-out New Jersey high school graduate preparing to attend his reunion. “And then they pray that they don’t run into someone actually from New Jersey.”

Our mythology about New Jersey comes as much from Springsteen as it does from Roth, as it will, for a new generation, come from “The Sopranos” and the rest of the crop of young artists skewering and eulogizing their state. And even if, heaven forfend, the Jersey jokes disappear, it’s possible that our half-proud, half-ironic idea of New Jersey will remain strong. Springsteen is crucial to this idea of New Jersey’s blue-collar roots, its masculinity and authenticity, its us-against-the-world mentality, its rebelliousness — and also to the idea of youth, hard work, dreaming of a world beyond home and the bittersweetness of going back. In many ways, perhaps, as Junot Diaz’s T-shirt bragged, Springsteen is about a sense of small-state survival that Jersey folks cling to, even if where they grew up wasn’t so bad. Springsteen provides New Jersey natives with one thing the jokes and stereotypes never suggest it had a shred of: Romance.

We all stake our claim to the Springsteen myth. These days, when people ask where I’m from, I usually say, “A small town in New Jersey, just south of Asbury Park.” That’s true: Wall is a few towns down the shore from Asbury, though the two places — one white and middle class, the other racially mixed and somewhat rundown — have virtually nothing in common. Claiming I grew up near Asbury Park says very little about me. But I guess I want in on the Springsteen myth, too. I’m proud of the boardwalks and tussles with the cops and summer love and factories and badlands and blue-collar boys with hot cars — even if I never experienced any of it. And, besides, my mother did. She was born in Asbury Park. Close enough.

Reiken’s fictional Rubin family was vacationing in the late ’70s, in Allenhurst, not far from poor, infested Manasquan, near where I grew up — a tiny town of tiny houses squished so close together that if a surfboard leaning up against one house fell, it could smack into the wood siding of another. Like many Shore towns — they’re all distinct, and yet they’re all “the Shore” — Manasquan is a sweet village populated by blondes and home to lively bars named Leggett’s, the Osprey, O’Neill’s. There, bachelorettes can do tequila shots to “Thunder Road,” “Living on a Prayer” and just about any song from the 1980s.

But — damn stupid syringes! Always getting in the way of the good stuff.

Of course, in Reiken’s bestselling, often mournful 2000 book, the Shore’s peculiarities aren’t limited to this particularly memorable ocean detritus. Reiken also memorializes the bacteria-laced water that almost prevents young boys from bodysurfing during their fleeting summers of freedom; the rickety bars called Tides where mothers get drunk and then later arrested for driving while intoxicated; the greasy cuisine glistening under fluorescent lights at take-out places like the Windmill in Long Branch (awesome hot dogs). And it all adds up to as dead-on a rendering of the nation’s armpit as any you’ll find. Overall, Reiken pays respects to the bad behavior that the Jersey Shore, with its unremarkable beach beauty and seedy boardwalks, salutes you for indulging in. “They all played Skee-Ball for a while, then walked the boards, acting like jerks, as they often did,” Reiken writes of his young boys, and nothing ever seemed as true, and weirdly wonderful, about the place.

Many people, those coming from Philadelphia or New York anyway, think of Ocean City or Wildwood or Long Beach Island when they hear the words “Jersey Shore.” Or they think of Springsteen, and therefore a mythic place that may or may not exist. But that region — the once syringe-infested landscape of “Lost Legends,” which includes Asbury, Belmar, Spring Lake, perhaps Point Pleasant — certainly still exists, in all its funnel cake and cotton candy glory. Down this shore, New Yorkers and Northern Jerseyites are called “Bennys,” and locals are branded “clamdiggers.” Million-dollar homes in Spring Lake border raucous, Benny-ville rentals in Belmar. Arcades dot Ocean Avenue, along with prissy beach and pool clubs. Jeeps, not always Camaros, cruise the highways and side streets, pretty girls’ long, straight hair whipping around the tanned faces of lean, jockish guys. They may or may not ever leave home.

When we think of New Jersey literature, however, it’s Philip Roth’s North Jersey, from “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1969) to “The Plot Against America” (2004), that first comes to mind. James Kaplan’s “Two Guys From Verona” (1998), with its hapless adult male characters fumbling around in the shadow of New York City, also depicts the kind of North Jersey suburbia made all the more miserable by its undeniable inferiority complex. It’s harder to identify why exactly the comedies of Tom Perrotta, “Bad Haircut” (1994) and “Joe College” (2000), seem so drenched in Jerseyness, but in “Bad Haircut,” when a bunch of kids head to a bleak mini-mall parking lot to meet a human hot dog, one is immediately convinced that their brand of middle-class adolescent excitement over meeting a supposed “celebrity” could only happen to the oddly isolated and easily charmed natives of the Garden State.

But as anyone from there will tell you, New Jersey is a bunch of states within a state, each special in its own twisted way. While Reiken discovers the Shore in the details, Richard Ford, in “The Sportswriter” (1986) and “Independence Day” (1995), reveals its soul, something admittedly harder to find amid the ridiculousness. But Ford’s Frank Bascombe is suffering through a Nowheresville of his own existence and Jersey is the perfect setting for such a crisis: “a plain, unprepossessing and unexpectant landscape,” he writes, with doom. After a description of the Shore’s “empty out-of-season vegetable stands, farmettes, putt-putts and cheerless Ditch Witch dealers,” he reassures us: “Vice implies virtue to me, even in landscape, and virtue value. An American would be crazy to reject such a place, since it is the most diverting and readable of landscapes, and the language is always American.”

When Frank’s friend confesses to being gay, after a day of fishing in Brielle with his Divorced Men’s group, he does it at “a barny old hiproofed fisherman’s roadhouse with a red BAR sign on top.” That dive may be fictional but it reminded me of what would now be Union Landing or Harpoon Willy’s, restaurants overlooking the Manasquan River where you can sit for hours, drink a lot, and watch the boats go by. They’re the kinds of local haunts that, when you pull into the parking lot, white gravel crunches beneath your car wheels — the sound of a hearty welcome and later a tipsy farewell. “It is a place where you’d be happy to consider yourself a regular,” Ford writes, “though when all is said and done you have nothing at all in common with anyone there except some speechless tenor of spirit only you know a damn thing about.”

Much of the Shore is more built up now, and even the humbler towns, blissfully shocked by the real estate boom, strive to mirror the moneyed splendor of Spring Lake rather than the folksiness of Ford’s old Brielle. New, super-fancy houses have sprung up on the oceanfront, wedged in between the old bungalows, all so one window can steal a paltry view of the sea. (That sea, by the way, is now always pretty clean.) But it still feels the same as home always does, or perhaps as the Jersey Shore, particularly, always will — pizza-and-fries combo meals in cardboard, babies happily munching on the sand, and freckled women lounging in rainbow-colored beach chairs, sunscreenless and squinting contentedly into the sun.

Sachs’ appealing book was received with adulation, but critical reviews of it made a splash too. Essays in the New York Times and the Washington Post, for instance, commended the professor for passionately shoving poverty to the fore, yet angrily denounced his central plan. “Sachs’s missionary zeal is infectious, but the flaws in ‘The End of Poverty’ should sound important notes of caution,” said one. “The danger is that when the utopian dreams fail (as they will again), the rich-country public will get even more disillusioned about foreign aid,” warned another.

That last quote (from the Washington Post Book World) was written by the New York University economist William Easterly, once called the “Charles Murray” of the aid debate by then Times columnist, now Times editor, Bill Keller. Easterly’s new book, “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,” suggests that the world’s official aid agencies — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.N. — and national agencies such as USAID, have been recycling the same unworkable aid plans for the last 50 years. (Non-governmental organizations are not necessarily included in his argument.) In fact, Easterly claims that Jeffrey Sachs’ strategy resembles failed utopian aid policies that date back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Easterly, on the other hand, believes in small, preferably homegrown, “piecemeal” efforts that focus on one specific problem at a time, perhaps focus on one specific problem in one tiny village.

At times, Easterly sounds a lot like the typical intervention critic, casually denouncing rich white Westerners who, as he sees it, meddle in thorny affairs of which they have no genuine understanding. But Easterly once meddled himself: He worked as a World Bank official for 16 years. “I didn’t know anything,” he told Salon by phone about his 26-year-old self. “I knew what you learn in an economics Ph.D. program. Over time I learned as I went along. A lot of aid jobs are writing reports. As if Africa could be made rich by reports. But I was a slow learner. I stayed in the World Bank for 16 years before I got disillusioned enough to want to try and reform the business I’d been in for so long.”

What does “poverty trap” mean and why don’t you believe in it?

The idea of the poverty trap is that if poor people start off poor, they will have difficulty saving enough to finance the investment they need to get out of poverty. It was appealing as a theory, it sounds like plausible common sense. Like other plausible common sense-sounding theories it turned out not to be true. Poor people save more than you would think and saving is not the only way to escape from poverty. Plenty of countries have started off poor and have had quite decent growth. If we take the poverty trap literally then really it should still be true for everyone — life would have been a place that was nasty, brutish and short. That’s a line I stole from someone else.

But this theory is the guiding principle for aid, isn’t it?

This was the original rationale for aid back in the 1950s and it still is. One thing that strikes me — having been trained in this field and having read all the old and new writings — is just the amazing parallels between what was written in the 1950s (which should have solved the problem by 1965). My good friend Jeff Sachs’ book really capitulates ideas that could have been written by Walt Rostow, an advisor to Kennedy and Eisenhower. He was writing the same stuff about the big push and the poverty trap. Unfortunately, experience since then has pretty amply demonstrated that that approach hasn’t worked. Somehow we don’t learn from failure. We’re trying the same thing over again, which is very discouraging. If occasionally a note of outrage leaks out in the book, it’s because I got so frustrated with the way failed ideas get recycled.

Why do you think they do?

These ideas offer simple answers and promise big things — the end of poverty, for example — in a fairly easy way that doesn’t require huge sacrifices from rich countries: Just increase aid a little bit more, and that would lift the world’s desperately poor out of poverty. I wish that were true myself. But simple is always appealing to politicians: Here is the thing that I can do that will alleviate this tragic problem of world poverty. So politicians like Blair and Bush can give the impression that something’s being done. The public isn’t terribly informed about what’s actually happening in remote villages in Africa. There’s no check on whether problems are being solved or not. Africans don’t vote in our elections — there’s no pushback when plans don’t work out or get results. Nobody is holding the aid donors accountable.

So the people who receive the aid should be holding them accountable?

In aid, 95 percent is implementation. Five percent is raising enough money from rich-country donors. [Bob] Geldof and Bono are talking about solving the 5 percent. The 95 percent has a long chain of poorly motivated and sometimes corrupt actors in between money and poor people. Donor bureaucracies like the World Bank or IMF are even less accountable than Blair and Bush because they don’t have to face election. They’re operating in a place that’s hidden from view. I don’t want to be too cynical. I think there are a lot of well-meaning professionals at these places. I am more cynical about the management, who I think just like to make a big splash in the media. The donor bureaucracies only have incentives to move the money. If it isn’t spent, that will be a scandal, but what happens far away is never known.

Of course, there are tons of problems on the receiving end. These are fragile states with often-poisonous political situations, conflicts, corruption, patronage politics. Health workers, for example, are appointed for political reasons and don’t have much incentive to get medicine to children. Drugs disappear on black markets.

Bob Geldof seemed concerned about accountability when he sponsored his aid concerts this year. What happened when he raised all that money for Ethiopia in the ’80s?

The problem was that the money passed through an authoritarian Marxist government whose main preoccupation was fighting a war against rebels who eventually ended up winning. There are plenty of allegations that both sides used food aid as a political weapon in war. That’s the kind of messy reality on the ground that makes it so hard for good intentions — even a caring person like Geldof — to actually have the money accomplish something good.

“Accountability” seems like a buzzword today, in general.

A lot of people are talking about accountability because that has been a criticism that has been voiced strongly in the last years. And that’s the main criticism that I would make of the whole exercise. But as I learned from being on the inside of a bureaucracy, they’re very skillful at deflecting criticism. When the World Bank is told they don’t have accountability they immediately write five reports about how they will.

But you know it’s become a meaningless buzzword at this point. We have to rescue the original idea. What does it mean? It means you are individually responsible for whether you did something. Someone gives you a reward or penalty — that way of thinking is completely alien to the whole aid bureaucracy, I can tell you.

So how would the people receiving aid hold aid groups accountable?

You’d have to be creative to think of ways to give people who receive aid a voice. The technical solution is to do evaluations before and after.

I thought NGOs already did this.

NGOs do it a little bit, but NGOS are not necessarily the knights in shining armor that will ride to the rescue of aid problems. They have their own problems — they respond to big problems that will be very visible to rich-country publics so rich people will give donations. Like the tsunami. All the NGOs will flock in, even though, as tragic as that event was, the amount of money that went to it was more than could be effectively spent to help the victims. It would be better spent on long-run development, nutrition or school programs.

I think you need to explain what you mean by too much money. The perception is that these poor, and now devastated, communities need everything they can get.

There’s never too much money in the sense of need. But the problem comes back to 95 percent implementation. You have to have the aid workers or locals who are motivated and accountable make sure money does good things, and they can only handle so much money. Huge amounts overwhelm the system.

So, Jeffrey Sachs is obviously prominent. And so are you. How could two economists come up with such opposite conclusions on a problem that’s been going on for years? Is it political motivation? Ego?

Frankly, I don’t think Jeff Sachs is doing good economics. Call economists at top schools and ask their opinion and I think you would get a similar one. He wants to solve problems in administrative and bureaucratic ways whereas economists want to ask: What are the incentives for people to get things done? Who has the incentive to make things work on the ground? And Jeff doesn’t address that at all in his book. It’s all about the technological, scientific or administrative situation you would need to improve soil fertility. But there’s nothing about who will be the one implementing the solution to soil fertility.

Well, who should be?

I’ll tell you right away my answers are never as convincing as the problems. Because there has been so little incentive to learn from past failures, we’ve been recycling and we have a lot less knowledge than we would have if we’d treated the last 40 years as a trial-and-error experiment with lots of methods on the ground.

The answers differ from one country to another. There’s been far too little learning. To learn you have to admit mistakes. In aid, it’s politically poisonous to ever admit you made a mistake because then the fear is they’ll cut aid.

In defense of aid agencies, they really had a bad political environment in which to operate — they’re never allowed to make mistakes and thus they never learn.

Can you give an example of something that worked then?

I like the example I gave in the first chapter of the book. There’s a nonprofit NGO called Population Services International, which is trying to control malaria in Africa. It’s a huge problem. The prevailing administrative top-down apparatus is to just hand out free bed nets through mass campaigns. That has not worked because when you flood the market with free bed nets and you don’t educate people on their great benefits, they end up not used or they’re diverted — since they’re free — to other uses, like wedding veils or fishing nets.

So PSI tackled this problem in Malawi. They don’t like the model of just flying in the 22-year-old white kid from America to tell the local people how to solve their problems. They employ a lot of local staff. Their local staff came up with a reasonable solution that worked better: They targeted a high-risk group, which is pregnant women and children under 5, and they had the nets sold at a highly subsidized price to mothers through antenatal clinics and gave the nurses a commission. When you give nurses a commission and offer counseling — and these are local Malawian nurses, not rich arrogant foreigners telling them what to do — the number of children sleeping under them went way up. This model is now being copied by other countries.

The free bed net campaigns in some countries have statistics like: 70 percent of bed nets not used. And there are even scarier ones. In a refugee camp in Uganda, a survey found six months later that one-third of the nets were still in the package, one-third were out of the package but not used, and one-third were being used. When Jeff Sachs ignores that kind of problem — that’s why I have to disagree.

But obviously the reaction must be, how could you make poor people pay for things?

There’s a visceral reaction to making people pay for things. That’s another way I think Sachs is being demagogic — he insists they have to be free whereas the PSI camp is charging mothers 50 cents per net. That isn’t trivial, but once the benefits are clear, then 50 cents is very worthwhile for someone who wants to save their child from malaria. The advantage of charging something for someone is that it places some value on it. That doesn’t play well in demagogic politics that surround debates about poverty, but it’s pragmatic. When people pay for things they feel like they have a right to hold you accountable.

Are the products always fairly priced, though?

They make sure it’s within their ability to pay. Then once the villagers pay then they get very angry if someone dies anyway. This is a totally homegrown aid program.

It’s common to rail against white foreigners implementing aid. But is there evidence that poor people respond better to programs run by locals? Or is it simply that locals know more about what’s going on — which I guess would suggest that the white aid people just need to be well-informed?

It’s more the second than the first — the local people just know so much more about local conditions. Especially when there’s some social entrepreneur working on one specific problem rather than the U.N. trying to achieve Millennium Challenge goals.

What are those goals exactly?

According to Sachs, they recommend 449 separate interventions to achieve improvements in the 54 indicators of poverty and suffering and to try and achieve this by 2015. That’s just an impossible, unworkable plan.

Wouldn’t the 449 interventions be 449 small plans, rather than one Big Plan?

When Sachs and I talked, he kept insisting that what he’s doing is not a “plan,” and then I quoted large sections of books he writes that talk about planning and strategies back to him. I think he may not like the word because it’s become pejorative — it sounds like a top-down plan to me. It was designed by 250 world experts meeting on task forces and writing reports — that’s an expert-driven approach. Very top down.

What are we to do about countries with corrupt governments?

The aid business has been stuck on this problem. You get people who say, “Well, the government is not really so bad, let’s give them money anyway.” Which is what I read the U.N. and Sachs as saying. And then you get people like the U.S. government and the IMF and World Bank saying, “Let’s supply tough love and we’ll only give aid if they reform.”

Both of these approaches have been tried and neither has worked. First of all, all the governments are not good governments so the first camp is way out of their depth. Second, although it might sound good in principle — these structural adjustment loans — all the empirical evidence is that aid is not successful in changing behavior. An awful lot of people agree that that’s been a failure. It was applied widely in Africa, the Soviet Union (called “shock therapy”), Latin America, the Middle East and somewhat less in Asia.

Part of the secret of the success in Asia is that they’re in a stronger position to resist being told what to do. They’re big, old civilizations that have strong senses of nationalism and self-determination and they have a big weight on the international scene.

But is there a way to bypass corrupt governments?

I think so. Try and get help to individuals and make products and services available that don’t depend on governments. There’s been this country obsession in the foreign aid business that somehow the objective is to fix countries.

Well, so they can help themselves eventually.

I don’t think countries are what matter so much; I think aid should just try and help individuals. That would free up enormous amount of money and reserves (now being wasted on trying to reform governments) into programs just focused on poor people. On getting drugs and textbooks to the poor. Doing things like the Gates Foundation: trying to create a malaria vaccine.

Is that organization effective?

The Gates Foundation is definitely more creative than official aid agencies, but they have to be diplomatic also. Gates is caught halfway in between the conventional wisdom and trying to think of new approaches that work better.

Your book is pointedly called “The White Man’s Burden.” It’s often said that aid is an extension of colonialism. But isn’t it to a certain extent an effort to rectify the damage done by colonialism?

I don’t think aid is a nefarious conspiracy to keep control in countries that used to be colonies. But it is part of the kind of colonial mind-set that has persisted. Kipling’s “white man’s burden” saw colonials as these benign white people bringing civilization to these people. It was put in much more p.c. language and became “foreign aid,” but still with rich, white people in charge thinking they knew the answers. There certainly isn’t the overt racism as before, but there is paternalism.

What’s happening now in countries like the Congo and Sierra Leone and Sudan and all these failed states — there’s this new rhetoric which I find worrisome that we should do something like shared sovereignty or trusteeships. That sounds a lot like colonialism to me. I’m not saying we’ll re-colonize — that certainly won’t happen — but they are failed states where very intrusive political and military intervention is taking place, which is somehow seen as the same package as foreign aid. That’s very neocolonial. I get invitations now and then to attend workshops with soldiers and aid workers who learned how to work side by side to reform society. Those e-mails scare the daylights out of me. That’s the last thing that should happen.

Not to overkill something that has been overkilled, but in Iraq we’re showing signs of these bad tendencies: military and aid are part of same package.

But are you saying we should never intervene militarily, even during genocide? You mentioned Sudan.

One should never say never. It’s very hard to watch “Hotel Rwanda” and say the West should never intervene. I’m sure if we’re on the ground in Darfur it would be very hard to say the West should keep hands off. But again, that’s the contrast between the grandiose plans to fix whole countries vs. the piecemeal apparatus that tries to help individuals and solve specific problems. Even with military intervention I think this same divide could apply. Yes, try and figure out a way to rescue civilians in Darfur from rape and murder and burning villages, but certainly do not attempt to invade Sudan and achieve regime change that is aimed at turning Sudan into an oasis of peace and prosperity. Just have more specific doable things that you can be held accountable for.

But Kristin’s also a self-proclaimed bitch with a truly awful SoCal accent, the girl who snarls at classmates in geometry and probably throws a decent punch, the kind the girls fear will steal their boyfriends and the boys describe as a “really cool chick.” And, of course, Kristin plays herself on TV, and so sensitive MTV viewers will note that it’s her real-life catty-girl persona that, for some reason, is being rewarded these days. Kristin is a rich, triumphant mean girl, the stuff ’80s soap operas were made of. But, ultimately, she isn’t pleasurable in the classic Alexis Carrington way because, well, this scary queen bee actually exists.

All of which makes her popularity slightly odd. In many ways, it’s amazing any vaguely likable character emerged from the palatial estates and plastic chins of Laguna Beach. Dubbed “The Real O.C.,” this show is a blander narcotic than even “The Real World.” Cameras follow around a crop of attractive American high-schoolers as they drive Range Rovers, tan their bums and shop for ugly sunglasses. Of course, it’s all spellbinding in that it forces you to confront serious questions about yourself: Why am I watching this? Will Character X ever complete a full sentence? Was I like this when I was 17? How lucky am I to be in the sinkhole of adulthood?

Which might be why Kristin’s such a star. At a time when we’re ever more attentive to the intricate miseries of teenagers, Kristin seems strangely aware that all of this, all of this high school stuff, is total bullshit. Considering how one of the requirements of adolescence is to assume that nothing will ever get better — the concept of perspective is as confusing as constructing attractive outfits for gym class — this quality makes her quite different from your run-of-the-mill teen.

When the show was being conceived, it was Lauren Conrad — charismatic, blond and button-nose cute with an ability to flash sad, sweet eyes on cue — who was meant to be the focus of the show. But the louder, springier Kristin stole every scene out from under Lauren’s espadrilles. A love triangle formed with dark-haired, fine-boned Stephen as the prize. A beach bonfire showdown was in the making, and one’s loyalties naturally fell to Lauren. She was so much nicer, and when she spoke, it didn’t make your ears hurt.

Slowly, though, Kristin began to exhibit bizarrely rational and admirable behaviors. Prime example: When the hard-won Stephen asked her what they’d do once he went off to college, Kristin, not missing a beat, replied with that arrogant shrug of hers: “We’ll break up.” Usually, a boyfriend departing for the planet of coed bathrooms is a traumatic, all-consuming event. But for Kristin, a fun-filled year of high school was far too precious to throw away for teary late-night phone calls and pointless bouts of jealousy-filled rage. Kristin clearly relished her role as the hard-partying heartbreaker (who, out of her friends, also seems to do the best in school). She also probably knew that it would make for better TV.

Lauren continued to let Stephen mess with her head; Kristin moved on. While the other normal girls on the show fell for typically caddish surfer boys, and fought with each other at fashion show fundraisers, Kristin continued to roll her eyes at them and cackle, I just wanna, like, have funnnnnn. You know? a mantra that seemed radical amid her friends’ hand-wringing. When she chastised her friend Jessica for still speaking to her cheating ex-boyfriend, it was with the sort of fury that can only be unleashed in the privacy of an upscale boutique dressing room: STOP CALLING HIM, JESS-I-CAAA. I’M SERIOUS. ENOUGH. When their mutual friend Alex noted that Jessica was the type of girl who would do anything for a guy, Kristin replied across the pedicure station with decades-old wisdom, And that’s sooo not gu-uuuud. It wasn’t that she became a more palatable character but rather that she seemed to possess knowledge that her peers did not, namely that: Ten years from now I will probably forget this piddling crap ever happened, and yet if I make a fool of myself, it will be on tape forever. It became fun to watch her savvy: She wasn’t just one-up on the boys, she was one-up on the cameras.

In fact, Kristin’s something of a snotty little sage, as if she’d graduated high school long ago, climbed in a time machine, and returned with a vengeance for another shot at teendom. Few parents would want a teen with Kristin’s soul, not to mention her dialect, and who knows whether Kristin will turn out to be a coldhearted, calculating woman someday. But teens could do worse than to adopt her sense of perspective. For anxiety-riddled tween-somethings everywhere, she’s a reminder that high school is the last breath of childhood, the twilight years of irresponsibility, and the tingly last days of brainless fun.

These renderings of the genocide include many unfathomable images of men furiously hacking at other men, of whole communities decimated while seeking refuge in church, of bloated, days-old bodies choking the country’s rivers. As by now most people know, in Rwanda, the vast majority of the Hutu population participated in the mass killing of their fellow Tutsi countrymen (as well as Hutu moderates) in only 100 days, a little more than three months. The killing was done without the efficient aid of gas chambers or bombs or machine guns; instead, most of the murders were of the one-on-one sort — a very personal, laborious killing in which many, many people willingly, almost enthusiastically, took part.

Although Western writers and artists have attempted, and will continue attempting, to translate the reality of a mass extermination, it’s a nearly impossible task. They succeed in many ways, but what they can’t quite get across is technical: What is it like for one entire population to kill another, day after day, for an entire season of the year? Did the men go to work too? Did they make love at night, and wake up and kill in the morning? Did they read books, get drunk, tell bedtime stories — all after a day’s kill? Did they cry?

“Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak,” the second book on Rwanda by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, attempts to answer some of these questions, and gives this madness a shocking sort of order. Hatzfeld interviewed 10 Hutus six years after the genocide, while the men served time in jail. These Hutus were from the rural Nyamata district (population 119,000), which includes a small town and 14 surrounding hills (Rwanda is lush and mountainous) split almost half between Hutus and Tutsis. Beginning in April 1994, within six weeks, five out of every six Tutsis in Nyamata were killed.

The 10 men, ranging from 20 to 62 years of age, hailed from these hills, where most of them were farmers. “None of them has ever quarreled with his Tutsi neighbors over land, crops, damage, and women,” Hatzfeld writes. In fact, they lived next door to Tutsis, played soccer with them, went to church with them. “But these ten banded together,” Hatzfeld explains, “because of the proximity of their fields, their patronage of a cabaret, and their natural affinities and shared concerns.” Hatzfeld gives the reader a basic sense of who the men are — the little detail already provided in this review — but he wisely lets the men talk first before proffering their proper biographies. “That bunch was famous on the hill for carousing and tomfoolery,” said Clementine, a local Hutu who is married to a Tutsi. “Those fellows did not seem so bad.”

The Rwandan genocide officially began after the death of President Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, whose plane was mysteriously shot down on April 6, 1994. The death of the president was the excuse the Hutu extremists needed to begin the killing that they had long planned. (Obviously, Rwandan history is ever more complicated: Hutu extremists had long been paranoid about Tutsi power; at various times Tutsis had suffered, and been slaughtered, at the hands of Hutus; a group of exiled Tutsis organized the Rwandan Patriotic Front, with whom Habyarimana had signed peace accords in 1993. Later, the RPF would enter Rwanda and stop the genocide.)

Hatzfeld’s band of ordinary Hutus, incited by extremists broadcasting on the radio, gathered together, singing songs and screwing around, and then headed down to the marshes where they believed the Tutsis were hiding. The new killers indeed bonded immediately: “We gathered into teams on the soccer field and went out hunting as kindred spirits,” said Ignace. “We had to work fast, and we got no time off, especially not Sundays — we had to finish up,” said Elie. “We canceled all ceremonies. Everyone was hired at the same level for a single job — to crush all the cockroaches.”

The most difficult part of all of this is to comprehend the moment when men become killers. The Hutus claimed not to have been forced to kill, though they did fear the consequences of not joining in at the beginning. By the time of the interviews, killing strikes them as quite normal. It’s not as though their first kill is particularly memorable. Still, they attempt to recall it:

Fulgence: “First I cracked an old mama’s head with a club.”

Alphonse: “I was quite surprised by the speed of death, and also by the softness of the blow.”

Adalbert didn’t remember the “precise details” of his first kill: “Therefore the true first time worth telling from a lasting memory, for me, is when I killed two children, April 17.”

They meditate on murder like this throughout the book. Elie: “The club is more crushing, but the machete is more natural. The Rwandan is accustomed to the machete from childhood. Grab a machete — that is what we do every morning.” Alphonse: “Saving the babies, that was not practical. They were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away.”

Indeed, especially for farmers, slicing at things was routine. The men use the word “cut” to describe their murders, as if what they did was akin to dragging a paper edge across a thumb. Obviously it’s a callous way of distancing themselves from their deeds, but it also signals the parallel they saw between hacking Tutsis and working in the fields.

Yet, there were differences. “Killing was a demanding but more gratifying activity,” said Pio. “The proof: none ever asked permission to go clear brush on his field, not even for a half-day.” Soon it became addictive, and there were rewards: “We could no longer stop ourselves from wielding the machete, it brought us so much profit.” The looting that accompanied the killing was dazzling for the poor farmers, and it offered a way for the women to pitch in (though some women and children did kill). They stole everything — some even grabbed the bloodstained clothing of the dead. “If you went home empty-handed, you might even be scolded by your wife or your children,” one man said. And despite knowing that their husbands were out raping women and then killing them, most wives still made love to their husbands at night.

Many men insisted that this life — the one where they woke up and killed people all day — was a better one. “Man can get used to killing, if he kills on and on,” said Alphonse. Fulgence went one step further: “The more we saw people die, the less we thought about their lives, the less we talked about their deaths. And the more we got used to enjoying it.”

As the killing went on, the men became intoxicated by the idea of “finishing the job.” The idea appears to have been that when it was all over, the Tutsis would be gone, and there would be no reminder of them. So the drive to kill every last Tutsi became more ferocious. In Nyamata not one bond of friendship spared a life, writes Hatzfeld; unlike in Nazi Germany, for example, Tutsis found “not a single escape network.”

But there was another key component to the genocide’s ferocity: No one was watching. There is nothing so damning in “Machete Season” as when the men speak of the “whites.” One man suggests that the idea of genocide germinated in 1959, when Hutus massacred many Tutsis “without being punished.” And in 1994, Hutu extremists gradually realized that the world was averting its eyes from the present atrocities as well. “All the important people turned their backs on our killings,” said Elie. “The blue helmets, the Belgians, the white directors, the black presidents, the humanitarian people, and the international cameramen, the priests and the bishops and finally even God … We were all abandoned by all words of rebuke.” Pancrace agreed: “Killing is very discouraging if you yourself must decide to do it … but if you must obey the orders of the authorities … if you see that the killing will be total and without disastrous consequences for yourself, you feel soothed and reassured.”

These were ordinary men, for sure. And ordinary men would have feared the punishment of others; as soon as the West pulled out of Rwanda they knew they were free to kill. It’s clear that if some force had been monitoring them, at least some of the motivation to kill would have withered away. Fittingly, one of the chapters in the book is titled “A Sealed Chamber.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, because of this long absence of condemnation, the men have no regrets. “I want to make clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one,” said Leopord. Hatzfeld notes in amazement that the killers speak in monotone and “never allow themselves to be overwhelmed by anything.” During the men’s seven years in prison, they knew of not one Hutu suicide. If they were depressed, it was only because they were locked up. “Aside from the anguish of my years in prison,” said Pancrace, “I do not see my life as harmed by all these regrettable events.” The unfortunately candid Elie takes a stab at remorse: “In prison and on the hills, everyone is obviously sorry. But most of the killers are sorry they didn’t finish the job.”

“Machete Season” is realistic and, above all else, terrifying; Hatzfeld brilliantly organizes his subjects’ stories for maximum effect. His method captures the rhythm of a genocide — the cold, workmanlike, fierce nature of its repetition. The book goes on and on, the killers are still alive, they persist, they won’t stop talking. Just when you think they won’t mention their machete again, it’s back.

When the men return home from jail, it’s to a country in trauma. “The silence on the Rwandan hills is indescribable and cannot be compared with the usual mutism in the aftermath of war,” writes Hatzfeld. What Hatzfeld suggests is the possibility of an Africa in turmoil because of many of its people’s learned fatalism. Perhaps the most terrible line in “Machete Season” is spoken by Pio, who noted with astonishment the silence with which the Tutsis confronted their deaths, even as he came near to where they hid in the marsh, machete in hand. They did not fight back. They did not cry out. “They felt so abandoned they did not even open their mouths.”

Readers hungry for the mere mention of Osama’s name, especially now, at a time when Sept. 11 remains fresh but the only glimpse of Osama is on “Saturday Night Live,” will turn these few sentences over and over in their minds. During the Afghan-Soviet war, Carmen Bin Ladin writes: “He was admired. He was involved in a noble cause. Osama was a warrior — a Saudi hero.” After meeting him for the first time, she notes, almost unimpressed: “He was not strikingly different from the other brothers — just younger, and more reserved.” But then there’s this: “When Osama stepped into the room, you felt it.” It’s one of many lines in “Inside the Kingdom” that leaves us desperate for more. What did she feel?

Of course, in Saudi culture, hardline Wahhabi Muslims like Osama insist that women’s faces be covered. Carmen Bin Ladin’s real, human contact with Osama was limited, and by Western standards almost nonexistent. But one scene in this plainly written but arresting memoir does shed light on Osama.

It was 1977, a time of relative freedom and ease in Saudi Arabia, after the rush of oil money flooded the country and two years before the Iranian revolution. The extended bin Laden brood had taken off to the family mountain house, two hours from their compound in Jeddah and the deadly August heat. Even in the mountains it was 100 degrees, but Osama’s wife Najwah, a tellingly miserable woman, refused to feed her tiny baby with a bottle. She was trying to feed him with a teaspoon, because her husband had decreed that his child would not be fed by bottle.

Carmen Bin Ladin, scared that the infant might become dehydrated, pleaded with a bin Laden sister to tell Yeslam, who was in the other room, to tell Osama that the child would become ill. (The men and women of the family couldn’t socialize together, and Carmen couldn’t intrude on the men as a female bin Laden blood relative could; often in Saudi Arabia, these elaborate, infantile games of “telephone” must be staged.) Yeslam’s reply? “It’s no use. This is Osama.”

This experience was a huge turning point for Carmen Bin Ladin, a Lausanne-born woman of Swiss and Iranian heritage. Not long after, she decided to leave Saudi Arabia behind forever and save her three daughters from an uncertain but probably unhappy fate. It coincided with another realization, an ominous and foreboding one for those Americans who are questioning our dubious relationship with the Saudis: “Underneath [Saudi men] have always maintained their self-assured and inflexible value system, and it rises to the surface as they age. This is what happened to the Bin Ladens in the years I lived with them, and it’s what happened to Saudi Arabia as a whole while I was there. It is still happening today.” The pictures of the Westernized Bin Laden brothers in their youth, sprinkled in the book, all Afros and bell-bottoms, are hard to shake, and the transformative power of the Wahhabi ideology that later overtook them seems at once bone-chilling and bewildering, fantastical and childish.

Carmen writes, however, that Osama bin Laden was never, as some have claimed, a playboy as a young man in Beirut. He may have been more Western at one time, but “the now famous photographs that were taken of a crowd of teenaged Bin Laden brothers in Sweden — they don’t show Osama either.” She maintains that “the boy identified in the media as Osama is in fact another brother.”

Ultimately, what is most interesting and perhaps most important about “Inside the Kingdom” are the details it provides about daily life in Saudi Arabia. “The Saudis are the Taliban, in luxury,” Bin Ladin writes. And “Inside the Kingdom” is also a personal, emotional account of a royal family and its bin Laden business friends — people to whom the United States and President Bush’s family remain inextricably linked, despite their autocratic rule and uncertain relation to the author of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The stark transformation of Carmen Bin Ladin’s own life might be what strikes readers most personally. The author married Yeslam Bin Ladin very young, when she was a stunning, sexy, glamorous-dressing Westerner, a woman who had traveled freely to her mother’s native Iran and back to her home in Geneva. In the early years of their marriage, Yeslam and Carmen lived in California, and the book features happy pictures of the handsome couple in sundresses and suits, T-shirts and jeans, lying on the grass in the sunshine.

When the couple moves to Saudi Arabia, it’s as if the world goes black and mute. Carmen writes of her first time wearing an abaya, the suffocating shrouds women must wear over their faces and bodies: “I looked out of the car window and through my veil I saw just a dim light — no people, no buildings. Even the streetlights were dark.” Not surprisingly, it gets worse. An extraordinarily rare trip to the grocery store, so she can get the proper milk for her daughter, involves an arduous charade: “And in order that one completely black-shrouded woman could walk inside with her husband, the store had been emptied — completely emptied — of all its clients and staff.”

In Saudi society, women simply have nothing to do. “There were no books,” Bin Ladin writes. “There were no theaters, no concerts, no cinemas. There was no reason to go out, and in any case we could not go out: I was not allowed to go for a walk, and legally could not drive.” Foreign newspapers featured blacked-out, unreadable sections — those bringing news of two countries: Israel and Saudi Arabia. Her daughters’ schooling is all religion, and “no sports, no debates, no discussions. No games, marbles, or tricycles.” Wafah, the oldest, returns home one day with “I hate Jews, I love Palestine” scrawled in her notebook, just as a normal girl would scribble her first name beside the last name of the little boy she loved.

After this beginning, it’s confusing to learn that just a few years later, the country flush with oil money, the bin Ladens could enjoy Thursday night parties where the sexes mingled and alcohol was served. Carmen Bin Ladin says she initiated these happy nights: Western businessmen and diplomats would visit for tennis matches and a perusal of her proud library. No Saudi women ever showed, but a few Saudi men did. One gets the sense that the Bin Ladens, under the protection of the Saudi royal family and their own astonishing wealth, really could do what they pleased.

Even in 1979, after the Islamist revolution in Iran, when Saudi Arabia returned to harsher ways, being a bin Laden meant something. In Saudi Arabia at that time a husband couldn’t tend to his pregnant wife in public: “One afternoon, I was in a supermarket when a pregnant woman fainted; her husband rushed to help her up. The mutawa [religious police] were there, and they stopped him, yelling at him that he must not take his wife in his arms in public.” Carmen, however, had a Sudanese driver by her side to shield her from the mutawa with two words: “Bin Laden,” the driver would say, and the police would back down.

The truth is that the bin Ladens choose to live the Wahhabi way, even though, as Carmen often suggests, they had the potential for more freedom than everyone else. The Iranian revolution also made Yeslam and his extended family, extraordinarily nervous and religiously obedient, terrified of the militant radicals in their own country. Yeslam would change forever, becoming a perpetually sick, intolerant, harsh and religious man, and later a harsh, religious man with mistresses on the side.

It was these changes in her husband that finally broke Carmen — both Yeslam’s infidelity and his demand that she have an abortion when she became pregnant with her third child. It was a request she’d complied with before, much to her despair. The hypocrisy in Saudi Arabian culture about women is difficult to get your mind around. Bin Ladin writes of Saudi princesses, locked up and disdained by their husbands, suffering from “bone density problems from lack of sunlight and exercise,” who, not surprisingly, fall in love with one another.

“We all heard rumors of a kind of lesbian party circuit in Riyadh,” Bin Ladin writes, “where women would socialize and pick each other up.” In Saudi Arabia, homosexuality is punished by public flogging. Yet, Bin Ladin implies, who can really be bothered to punish the silly Saudi lesbians? “Women don’t matter to a Saudi man,” Bin Ladin explains. “Possessing them matters — matters crucially — but once the women are locked in and breeding, what happens among them doesn’t count for much.” The rules in Saudi Arabia, it seems, are at once terrifyingly oppressive and weirdly arbitrary.

Carmen Bin Ladin rarely, if ever, talks about how the rest of the bin Laden clan regard the U.S. and the Western values that her former brother-in-law Osama despises so much. Yeslam and some of his other brothers conduct themselves like Westerners while vacationing in the West (Yeslam now lives in Switzerland himself), but we get no sense of whether their politics fall in line with those of their militant brother.

But Carmen does discuss the intense bin Laden clan loyalty, the Bedouin mentality that she believes makes Saudi Arabian men unique. She writes that she “cannot believe” the bin Ladens would cut Osama off completely: “I simply can’t see them depriving a brother of his annual dividend from their father’s company, and sharing it among themselves. That would be unthinkable — among the Bin Ladens, no matter what a brother does, he remains a brother.” At the end of the memoir, Carmen “openly defies” the bin Ladens to open their books and prove that they had nothing to do with Sept. 11.

The author, who now lives in Geneva and whose daughters studied in America, also never says outright what she thinks of the close relationship between the U.S. and the Saudi regime. Considering the steady and compelling case she builds for the tyranny of the society, however, it’s pretty easy to read between the lines. Or, at least, to share with her this fear about Saudi society and America’s silence about it: “If we, in the Western world, are not vigilant enough, there will be no end to their terrorism.”