Referring to the older version of the book: As a trained Political Scientist who worked in the area of economic planning part of the time she was in Saudi Arabia, the author does a very nice job of exploring the real crisis of inflexible Saudi traditionalism when first really confronted with the demands of modernity -- the weird mix of naivete, arrogance, and fear. We can see the reverberations still.
She's actually a lot less biased and more even-handed than a lot of newer books, and it's extremely readable and entertaining as well as informative. She touches on more aspects of Saudi lifestyle in one book than all of the half-dozen other books I've read combined -- urban and rural development, health care, economics, religion, education, sexuality, social psychology, and domestic and foreign politics. She is best as a political scientist-sociologist, OK as an anthropologist, and weaker as a social psychologist -- but even there, not bad.
This is a solid and fairly comprehensive foundation for understanding how modern Saudi Arabia came to be as it is, but it is not the place to stop.
