Appalled by the punishment of her rebellious friend, Florence Farfarletti, as deputy to the deputy assistant secretary for Near East Affairs, invents a far-reaching, wide-ranging plan for female emancipation in that part of the world.
Critic Reviews
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Favorable
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Publishers Weekly
Some readers may feel Buckley takes the joke too far, but most will find it all in good fun and excuse the author his excesses. [23 Aug. 2004, p.38]
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Favorable
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Wall Street Journal Daniel Akst
Florence of Arabia is not so much a novel as a delightfully savage comic fatwa -- one whose victims could not be more deserving.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Charles Trueheart
Christopher Buckley is likely to make some people very angry with this book, but there will be no denying the elegance and, by my lights, the essential gentleness of his wit.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Book Review Stephen Metcalf
The imperative to load each sentence with a punch line produces the inevitable clunker ... but the problem lies deeper: the technique is finally not up to the moral crisis it invokes.
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Mixed
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Boston Globe Amanda Heller
The author's insouciant worldview notwithstanding, some things are just too inherently unamusing to yield to the sophomoric charm of a spy caper. Perhaps without meaning to, the glib Mr. Buckley creates some surprisingly real characters to man (or woman) his Wasabi insurrection, and what he puts them through in the name of satire is not very funny.
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Mixed
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Entertainment Weekly Marc Bernardin
From the title on down, Buckley is all but begging you to notice how witty he is. And it's not hard to agree.
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Unfavorable
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Los Angeles Times Shashi Tharoor
As one has come to expect from Buckley, the premise is a clever one ... But its execution, like the garb of most of the novel's female characters, leaves something to be desired. "Florence of Arabia" falls flat, not even Sunni side up.[24 Oct. 2004, R5]
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