"Short Breaks in Mordor" now has 38 favourable reviews

My new e-book ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’ has now garnered a combined total of 38 favourable reviews (the great majority with five stars) on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

 

It is the sum of almost all my travels, Burma, North Korea, China, India, Bhutan, Africa, the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine:

You can read about Vladimir Putin’s creepy ‘Nashi’ youth movement, set up to combat any attempts at ‘People Power’ in Moscow, or how about Israel’s little-known, much-misunderstood Arab population – including Bedouin who used to fight in the Israeli Army but seldom do so now?

Here's a sample: ‘The service entrance to Hell must be something like this. On one side the two squat chimneys of a power station poke above the sandy hills. On the other a chemical factory exhales nameless filth into the hot sky. A few melancholy camels stand about waiting to be milked (or eaten), and flocks of sheep hunt for rare blades of grass.

 

The village, in reality a scattered, untidy archipelago of sordid, cramped hutments and tents, is crisscrossed by power-lines but has no mains electricity. Water is supplied via a feeble one-inch pipe, for several hundred people.

 

Ibrahim al Afash, the village headman, tells me an immensely long story of injustice, unfairness and mistreatment stretching back almost 60 years, before pausing for prayers in a Spartan mosque made of corrugated iron.

 

His complaint is made worse by the fact that the Bedouin Arabs, unlike their city-dwelling brothers, served willingly in the Israeli army.

 

They mostly do not do so any more.

 

The old man, who looks strikingly like Osama Bin Laden, said: 'I served in the army. They told me that if I did so I would receive all the rights given to any other Israeli. I did not receive a single one of those rights. My children saw this and drew their own conclusions.' Actually, while most Israelis concede that the Bedouin have been foolishly mistreated, it is not that simple. Here, unlike in any Arab country, a Bedouin gets a real vote in a contested election and has freedom of speech and thought. A minority of Bedouins live a great deal better in 'recognised villages', though nothing like as many as should do.

 

But this is the general problem of Israeli Arabs. By Arab standards they are well off.

 

By Israeli standards they are abominably mistreated. Some Israeli Arabs told me in private that of course they would not want to live in an Arab country, let alone in the West Bank or Gaza.

 

A plan to shift the border so a group of Arab towns in central Israel could be switched to Palestinian control was rejected with haggard horror by Arab leaders in Israel. They all ritually praise the Palestinian cause, but none wishes to live under its lawless rule.

 

One Arab journalist told me he had been asked by friends in the West Bank if he knew how to get them Israeli passports.’

  

Want to read on?  You can.

 

 

You do not need an e-reader to read it. If you have a computer, it's available to you in a matter of seconds.. You can download it through the Kindle Cloud Reader on to any device:

See here : 

http://amzn.to/1tuzY9f

 

You can find the book here:  

 http://amzn.to/1lCF9OM (UK) 

and 

http://amzn.to/T6wyZJ (USA)