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Rating: 
Summary: Put this on your list
Review: A well researched and well documented book by a veteran expert. Lippman has been studying and writing about the Middle East for a long time. Inside the Mirage benefits from his extensive travels and interviews. It is an eye opening, people oriented account. Read The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Saudi Arabia to get an overview. Read this one to delve deeper.
Rating:
Summary: Put this on your list
Review: A well researched and well documented book by a veteran expert. Lippman has been studying and writing about the Middle East for a long time. Inside the Mirage benefits from his extensive travels and interviews. It is an eye opening, people oriented account. Read The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Saudi Arabia to get an overview. Read this one to delve deeper.
Rating: 
Summary: A sober, well-written history
Review: I chose to read Lippman's book in an effort to better understand Saudi Arabia's history and place in the Muslim world. The author offers a detailed and nuanced survey of U.S.-Saudi relations from the 1930s up to the recent war in Iraq. His book filled many of my knowledge holes (which I expect are shared by many other Americans) and unexpectedly made me very interested in this fascinating nation.
Lippman describes how Saudi Arabia's Saud dynasy has quickly modernized the country in terms of technology and wealth while retaining staunchly devoted to a specific brand of conservative Islam. The combination of close economic and military ties with the U.S. and a contentious position in the Muslim world is highly complex and truly unique, and it has given rise both to important partnerships and some strong resentments. Saudi Arabia has been a vital ally in recent conflicts, yet many of the September 11 hijackers hailed from there. Lippman helps sort out this strange tangle of relations, and he does it in a very reasonable, non-polemic way and with a compulsively readable writing style. I'd like to see this very thoughful history be widely read by people interested in one of the United States' most vital yet precarious allies against terrorism.
Rating:
Summary: Indispensible
Review: Lippman presents readers a unique, detailed, highly readable and timely look at Saudi Arabia. This book is a needed starting point or supplement for readers striving the understand the role of traditional society, petroleum, development and politics on the Saudi-US relationship.This is the new and indispensible tome for the library of any serious scholar of Saudi relations with the United States.
Rating:
Summary: A balanced view
Review: Thomas Lippman has accomplished a brave thing. In his book, he takes a look at a difficult relationship without succumbing to the post-9/11 quest for demons.
Unlike Baer, who never worked in Saudi Arabia, or Schwartz, who has never even been to Saudi Arabia, Lippman bases his book on first-hand experience with the country and people who have lived there for extended periods. He also takes the time to talk with Saudis, an almost unheard of tact in this day of instant experts.
The early parts of the book are excellent. His rendition of the history and slowly-built alliances between America and Saudi Arabia are both factually and contextually correct. He might spend a little too much time on the "Cleaver family" nature of ARAMCO housing, but the effect it had on the Saudis working for and with ARAMCO is accurately captured.
In some ways, this book might have been better had its publication been delayed for a while. More information, rather than allegation, has come out about Saudi cooperation in the war against terror. For instance, contra the Washington Post review, Saudi Arabia did, in fact, begin anti-terror efforts immediately following 9/11, though the efforts were more highly charged after the 5/12 bombings in Riyadh. Too, Saudi efforts against terrorists in the midst continue today.
Rating:
Summary: An Examination of the Long "Marriage of Convenience"
Review: Thomas Lippman has provided a prescient discussion of the long and interconnected relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. This relationship has been among the forefront of the problems U.S. policymakers have been reexamining since 9/11, and is among one of the most complicated of the U.S.'s bilateral relationships today.
At the turn of the 20th century the area that is now Saudi Arabia was then a disparate mixture of clans soon to be united by Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. The lifestyles of the inhabitants of the land were not much different than their ancestors from millennia before. Within a few years a relationship would be started that would change the world.
The first American geologists came to Saudi Arabia in the early 1930s. These geologists first found oil in 1933 and found the first large and profitable oil fields in 1938. From the time of that first large discovery of oil on, the U.S. and Saudi would a close mutual relationship. The Arab American Oil Company, or Aramco, was set up to extract the new oil finds. In exchange, the Americans were charged with creating a modern, industrial society in the Kingdom. For the next 60 years, American government officials, private contractors, and the U.S. military would undertake projects that would lead to such things as a modern infrastructure for moving oil out of the ground and the country (Aramco, Bechtel), would establish the Saudi national airline (TWA), create a modern civil service (the Ford Foundation). In addition, U.S. government officials helped establish a paper currency and a central bank. In addition, since 1951, U.S. policy has been to recognize the protection of Saudi Arabia from outside threats as a vital national interest. This policy meant supplying military equipment and training for five decades and condoning harsh treatment of Saudi dissidents or those who long for many of the freedoms Americans hold dear, such as freedom of religion and speech.
U.S. Middle East policy, including the invasion of Iraq, the inability of the Saudi leadership to create the conditions for its newly educated young people to find jobs, and other issues are all swirling to create conditions inimical to the continuation of this marriage of convenience. While Lippman is unable to provide answers or speculation about the future, he has provided a valuable service by giving a remarkably balanced telling the story of the long, complicated relationship.
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