People Like Us
"In People Like Us, Joris Luyendijk tells the story of his five years as a reporter in the Middle East. Extremely young for a correspondent but fluent in Arabic, he spoke with stone throwers and terrorists, taxi drivers and professors, victims and aggressors, students and families. He chronicled first-hand experiences of dictatorship, occupation, terror, and war. His stories cast light on a number of major crises, from the Iraq War to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with less-reported issues such as orphans collecting trash on the streets of Cairo." "Yet the more he witnessed, the less he understood, and he explains here how he became increasingly aware of the yawning gap between what he saw on the ground and what was later reported in the media.