Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives Book

The only redeeming anything to this book (because quality is not a word I would use for it) is that it is one person's picture of Yemenese culture, a culture I knew nothing about before reading it. However, being someone that has traveled quite a bit, I found her treatment of the culture and country shallow, especially for a reporter. I enjoyed when she spoke about the reporters at the newspaper, especially when she related her conversations with the women reporters and discussed how they came to work at the paper and the obstacles they dealt with just to be able to do so. However, even how the author described the reporters as "hers" - "my women", "my men," "my reporters" - just rubbed me the wrong way. It took me weeks to get through this book because I found the author to be self centered, U.S.-centric and condescending from the very start of the book. She constantly described herself as a saviour of the newspaper, and even if she helped put in place more productivity, her self agrandizement just wore on me the more I read. Every time I picked up the book it was like having a frustrating conversation with someone I would never be friends with. This feeling was doubly confirmed when I got to the end of the book to find out she had an affair with a married man and described it as though it were some glorious experience that should be encouraged or desired by all. For someone that claimed to never have wanted to hurt anyone through her choices in that experience, I'm sure the ex wife is now reading those chapters and completely disturbed with how easily her husband left her for another woman. Discretion is not something this author thought to use when it came to that chapter of her experience in Yemen.