• Title: Inside the Kingdom
• Author: Carmen bin Ladin
• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Warner Books (June 13, 2005)
• ISBN: 0446694886

This is finally out in paperback, so I brought it along for my latest flight to Amsterdam.

The book is pretty good and a fast read. She’s obviously lived inside Saudi Arabia as a wife of a Saudi (that’s different than The Saudis for example, where the woman was American as was her husband) and the things she says match up with what I saw and heard way back when I was “over there.” I wish she had written less about her famous brother-in-law, Osama (she obviously didn’t know him well) and had written a bit more about her divorce, which must have really upset her former husband – there are few details about the problems he has caused her. But, its a great look at what its like to wear the burqa (black gauze covering the head) and deal with the second-class role women have in Saudi Arabia.