Rating: 
Summary: A spot light on the corruption in Saudi Arabia.
Review: To start with I read the Arabic translation of this book when I was in Cairo last week. It was translated by "Hisham Yahia" and published in Cairo (ISBN 977-5185-24-6) Jan 1996. Now I bought the original English version to compare. I am a pediatrician who worked in Saudi Arabia for 5 years and I witnessed a whole lot of corruption and injustice there, including discrimination against women, rape of young kids by their teachers in schools, and severe violation to human rights everywhere there. Although the Arabic translation is not well written, I can say that the book is a good panoramic image of the Saudi live. This culture has nothing to do with Islam. It is meant to protect the rotten government. I witnessed myself a tragedy of an Egyptian family whose young child was raped, and because the criminal was a VIP. The father of the child was humiliated and "lashed" in public, as a punishment because he dared to file a complaint. I personally recommend this book to the American reader, and I hope many other books about the miserable live in Saudi Arabia would be available. When you read this book please keep in mind that all this corruption and injustice do not belong to Islam the great religion that is victimized there. Perhaps USA would change its policy, and start seriously to pay attention to the human rights in this country.Friday, August 27, 1999
Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: Told in the first person voice of Princess "Sultana", this book will grab you from the beginning.
Rating:
Summary: Pull back veils of western ignorance
Review: Unbeknownst to so many western females the plight of our Middle Eastern sisters can be appalling. I removed my own veil of ignorance and read frightening accounts of this privileged muslim woman as she is controlled and manipulated by the men who purportedly love her. The most powerful weapon against any form of brutal oppression is education. I want to read the other books in the sequence by this author as well.
I regret that feminism has taken a back seat during recent years but I don't often forget that woman are still not equal anywhere. However, after reading this book and others written by muslim females in the Middle East, I know how far western women have come in comparison to some cultures such as those in Saudi Arabia. The Taliban was worse but not by much.
I don't take my freedom for granted.
Rating:
Summary: Oh my gosh!
Review: What a hard story to read! Princess Sultana's life is nothing like a the life of the Princesses of Britain. I knew that women in Saudi Arabia were completely veiled and that they were considered possesions of men there but I did not know to what extreme life is like there! The scariest part is that this book was published in 2001! This is not a story of life in Saudi Arabia a long time ago, it is what is happening there NOW. Not enough people realize what life is like in some countries and it's our ignorance that is helping to keep these countries the way they are. This story is Book I of the Princess Triologies, the other two being Princess Sultana's Daughters and Princess Sultana's Circle. I can't get a hold of these sequals fast enough, that's how much I 'enjoyed' this book. Enjoyed really isn't the right word as how can you enjoy reading about such horrible treatement of women! It is important to understand that while Saudi Arabia is 100% Islamic, most of what is happening is not actually a part of the Islmaic Religion but is a twisted version of the Koran and convenient ignoring of some parts of it. Jean Sasson includes some passage from the Koran on women in the back of this book and while some of it seems barbaric to Westeners, a lot of what goes on in Saudi Arabia and other countries is NOT supported by the Koran. This book is not an attack on Islam. I could talk about this book for hours and you would still be suprised and horrified when reading it. I could not prepare you for this book without actually typing the whole thing out. I highly recommend this book although only to adults. There may be some younger people who could handle this but I'm 20 and I believe well educated and this was hard for me to digest.
Rating: 
Summary: This is incognito????
Review: While I don't doubt that many of the atrocities cited in the book have occured at some point or another (there are too many outside corroborating accounts of such doings)and the book tells a facinating though tragic story, I wonder how this princess could possible remain incognito after having given so many very specific descriptions of her family. I could change my name to Micky Mouse, but if I gave as detailed a picture as the "princess" has, my family would spot me a mile away. Or maybe the Royals don't read, listen to the radio, travel out of the country, converse with others outside their family... Oh wait a minute! They do! So, what gives? I have other thoughts about this book but most of them have already been written about here so I'll leave it at that.
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