The Inner Sea: The Mediterranean and Its People

As a journalist for the BBC, Fox, who now writes for the London Daily Telegraph , criss-crossed the Mediterranean between 1984 and 1991, from Marrakesh in southern Morocco to Syria and Israel. His brilliant mosaic of reportage, travelogue and history offers both a marvelous adventure and a penetrating look at a region beset by population explosion, tribal wars, cultural conflict and the rise of crime syndicates, clan organizations and extremist religious groups. Fox's prose is precise and arresting: in Greece, ``the most conspicuous inanimate victim'' of pollution, he observes, ``is the Parthenon, bandaged in scaffolding against the mordant smog.'' He finds the past embedded in the present in French Provence, experiences culture shock in Egypt's Nile valley, analyzes Turkey's transformation into ``regional strong man'' and gauges Catalonia's cultural revival. In a concluding update, Fox discusses ``the Yugoslav vendetta,'' political corruption in Italy, Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq and the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Algeria. (May)