Tuesday, March 16, 2010

New book on Dubai

Syed Ali, Dubai: Gilded Cage, Yale University Press, 2010.

Syed Ali is assistant professor of sociology at Long Island University, Brooklyn.

From the book blurb:
Syed Ali delves beneath the dazzling surface to analyze how - and at what cost - Dubai has achieved such success. Ali brings alive a society rigidly divided between expatriate Westerners living self-indulgent lifestyles on short-term work visas, native Emiratis who are largely passive observers and beneficiaries of what Dubai has become, and workers from the developing world who provide the manual labour and domestic service needed to keep the emirate running, often at great personal cost.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Isn't he the same guy that was picked up and questioned by the Secret Police here some years ago?

If he's the same one, then this book is long due!

I hope he tells it all, no holds barred.

7:51 AM  
Anonymous Alpha Tango said...

Sounds like yet another boring book with nothing interesting to offer on Dubai.
Pfffffff. The only thing interesting about it would be the number of inaccuracies contained within it.
Don't people get tired of the whole manual labor in Dubai story? If I was so interested in that, I'd just go buy a book on how much it sucks to be an average Indian Subcontinent native/citizen.
But, hey, who am I to say anything? More power to the author.

9:52 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home