The bestselling author who made mincemeat of political
correctness in Thank You for Smoking,
conspiracy theories in Little Green Men,
and Presidential indiscretions No Way to
Treat a First Lady now takes on the hottest topic in the entire world—Arab-American
relations—in a blistering comic novel sure to offend the few it doesn’t
delight.
Appalled by the punishment of her rebellious friend Nazrah,
youngest and most petulant wife of Prince Bawad of Wasabia, Florence
Farfarletti decides to draw a line in the sand. As Deputy to the deputy
assistant secretary for Near East Affairs, Florence invents a far-reaching,
wide-ranging plan for female emancipation in that part of the world.
The U.S. government, of course, tells her to forget it.
Publicly, that is. Privately, she’s enlisted in a top-secret mission to impose
equal rights for the sexes on the small emirate of Matar (pronounced “Mutter”),
the “Switzerland of the Persian Gulf.” Her crack team: a CIA killer, a snappy
PR man, and a brilliant but frustrated gay bureaucrat. Her weapon: TV shows.
The lineup on TV Matar includes A Thousand and One Mornings, a daytime talk show that features
self-defense tips to be used against boyfriends during Ramadan; an addictive
soap opera featuring strangely familiar members of the Matar royal family; and
a sitcom about an inept but ruthless squad of religious police, pitched as
“Friends from Hell.”
The result: the first deadly car bombs in the country since
1936, a fatwa against the station’s entire staff, a struggle for control of the
kingdom, and, of course, interference from the French. And that’s only the
beginning.
A merciless dismantling of both American ineptitude and
Arabic intolerance, Florence of Arabia
is Christopher Buckley’s funniest and most serious novel yet, a biting satire
of how U.S. good intentions can cause the Shiite to hit the fan.
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