Product Description

Over the last fifty years, the city of Dubai has leapfrogged major stages of development to become Las Vegas on steroids, a vision of the future: "Dubai: The World's Fastest City" is the first book to tell its story. In the 1950s, with a few thousand souls scraping a living in a waterless desert by picking dates, diving for pearls, or sailing in wooden dhows to trade with Iran and India, Dubai was as poor as any village in Somalia or Sudan. Today freewheeling Dubai is everything the Arab world isn't. It's capitalism on cocaine. Las Vagas without the gambling but twice the prostitutes. It's the fastest-growing city in the world, with an economy that outpaced China's last year while luring more tourists than all of India. It's one of the world's safest places, but a stone's throw from its most dangerous. Shimmering skyscrapers hide gritty 24-hour construction at ground level. The city's name has become a metaphor for the lush life, where celebrities like Tiger Woods and George Clooney mingle in gilded splendor and where so many luxury cars cram the roads that one is sometimes treated to the spectacle of Porsche-only crashes. Yet the city is beset by a backwash of bad design, savage treatment of the environment and labor practices that veers close to slavery. This Arab sheikdom, one of seven semi-autonomous states in the United Arab Emirates, is becoming a rising force in the Middle East, a news story that affects all of us. It's time people in the West came to know this often misunderstood place.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8673 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
The modern city-state of Dubai exists largely because two men willed it so. Through a combination of prescient investment of resources, grandiose vision and the freedoms of absolute rule, the late Sheikh Rashid and his son (and current ruler) Sheikh Mohammed transformed the backwater village into a global powerhouse "erupting onto the earth." Mohammed's "ideas are so stamped on the landscape that two of his poems are being written on the sea as a group of [artificial] islands." Dubai-based journalist Krane does a superb job of conveying the near-manic atmosphere swirling around the creation of the world's tallest building (half a mile high), first indoor ski slope (in a mall) and--incidentally--the world's largest carbon footprint, revealing the creativity and tolerance that characterize a city where 95% of its residents are foreigners, as well as the inevitable costs of such lavish ambition. Environmental needs have been ignored (another island was built atop a coral reserve), and migrant laborers and sex workers face routine abuse and exploitation. A fascinating study of a small nation that has taken the ideas of modernization and capitalism to their outer limits. (Sept.) --Publishers Weekly (US) July 27, 2009

'DUBAI examines this small emirate with admirable even-handedness and good humour... Krane also writes movingly of the conditions of the Indian Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers who have built Dubai.'
--James Drummond, Finanacial Times

From the Author
Why a book on Dubai?

Jim arrived in Dubai in January 2005, where he found a city erupting onto the earth. Thousands of new residents streamed in each day. The entire city was a construction site, with more than 10 percent of the world's building cranes at work. Neighborhoods spread across the desert like kudzu. In the course of its six-year boom, Dubai swelled from a modest city to a bloated megalopolis the size of Houston - doubling in population and quadrupling in area. Most incredibly, this wild growth was taking place within a short distance of the carnage in Iraq, and was receiving little notice in the West.

Dubai, it turned out, was the antithesis of Baghdad. As fast as Iraq was being destroyed, Dubai was accomplishing the opposite. There are few, if any, places on earth where the span of modernization is so compressed, where extreme capitalist excess is just a generation removed from Third World poverty. Here, men born in palm shacks became billionaires. Shrewd professors, holders of PhDs from American universities, had been raised by illiterate parents.

The fact that such a success story has risen in the Arab world is of great importance, both inside the region and out. With little notice, Dubai's undemocratic capitalism has become the development model for the rest of the Middle East. Like it or not, the Dubai effect has already touched your life.

But all is not well with this brash city-state. Dubai accomplished its feats on the backs of a vast labor force of mistreated men who have never received their due. The city's success has destroyed far more lives than was necessary. And its wild growth upset the demographic balance, leaving the city 95 percent foreign and nearly 80 percent male. Dubai's pampered natives are such a tiny minority that retaining their sovereignty has become a major worry. Meanwhile, prostitution has become a necessity, spawning the tragic industry of human trafficking.

And, in the months since the onset of global recession, Dubai has emerged as the poster child of the previous era's gluttonous excess. Dubai's once soaring real estate values have collapsed further than anywhere on earth, and unemployed expatriates have fled for the exits. Krane's book examines the viability of Dubai's economic model, going forward.

In short, Dubai is a fascinating topic.

About the Author
Jim Krane is a freelance writer living in Dubai. He spent as a year and a half as Baghdad Correspondent and two-and-a-half years as Persian Gulf Correspondent for The Associated Press, the world's largest news agency, and was responsible for directing AP coverage in six Gulf countries, as well as editing copy from Iran. Jim travels frequently throughout the region, including visits to Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. His move to Dubai came after spending a year and a half as AP's Baghdad correspondent, where he won a prestigious AP Managing Editors award.

Customer Reviews

Intelligent and thought-provoking
In the 60s, long before Dubai became what it is now - a gold encrusted Monopoly board of skyscrapers and traffic jams - the man who later became the UAE's first president would pop into a newly opened department store. He'd peer into a child's View-Master and marvel at 3D images of the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. Then he'd turn to the store's owner and say, "One day, you will see. The tall buildings will be here."

The above anecdote is taken from Jim Krane's excellent new book on Dubai and, to an extent, it sums up everything that's wonderful and disappointing about how an insignificant fishing village has taken just a few decades to turn itself into one of the most prominent spots on the planet. On the one hand, it shows that the city's rise is the stuff of youthful dreams, the product of an irrepressible exuberance and lust for change. On the other, it suggests that maybe the process which has resulted in - amongst other ostentations - the world's tallest building might've benefited from at least a little more maturity and a little less impetuousness.

Starting with thoroughly engrossing accounts of the region's past - full of stories of pearl divers and trigger-happy British imperialists - Krane outlines the rise to power of Dubai's ruling family, moves on to the current political climate and concludes with a series of chapters which adopt an admirably non-judgemental tone to examine what are commonly considered to be the city's main vices, from prostitution to the treatment of expatriate labourers. Along the way, he includes evidence from fascinating historical sources as well as first-hand interviews to create a sophisticated portrait of a place which has all too-often either been unquestionably lauded by fans or summarily rubbished by detractors. Finally, he looks to the future and puts forward several intriguing ideas about where the Emirate might go in the next few years, including one possibility that it might gain independence from the rest of the UAE before too long. Perhaps Krane's ultimate message is that, love it or loathe it, Dubai has now become a city as complex and multi-layered as any other, and that it deserves to be appraised on its own terms.

For people who've lived in Dubai, `The Story of The World's Fastest City' is essential reading, certain to stir emotions and challenge long-held prejudices. For others, it provides a balanced insight into the region, with all its idiosyncrasies and seemingly incomprehensible paradoxes. Although you may not agree with every point it makes, you can't deny the power and neatness of Krane's prose and, of course, the allure of his subject. Dubai tells a story that you just can't put down. The only question is: can you keep up with it?

Best written book on Dubai yet
We've seen several books on Dubai in recent years and this is, by some way, the best. It wins on two fronts: first, its an interesting and accurate history of the emirate and second, its beautifully written.

Previous books, such as Chris Davidson's Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success, have certainly added to the reader's undestanding of Khaleeji culture and the development of the emirate of Dubai. However, many lack the pace of Crane's book which rattles along at a fine pace, yet still covering what is known of Dubai with depth and breadth.

Davidson's book also has annoying mistakes which to readers who really know Dubai are at best annoying and, at worst, make one doubt other details in the book.

As a long term resident of Dubai, I particularly enjoyed the early chapters which, for me, put the modern Dubai into perspective. My reading of it is that the last few years of stellar growth are entirely consistent with the plans of its earliest rulers and that the current economic woes are just one more challenge for the brave and hardy people of Dubai to overcome.

Dubai is a fascinating city of contrasts. It makes up one small part of an amazing, young, growing country. This book comes as close as possible to explaining the feeling, the facts and the sheer wonder of the place.

Great stuff, the best yet on Dubai
Reading American journalist Jim Krane's book `Dubai: Story of the World's Fastest City' is a must for anybody who wants to gain a perspective on what is happening in this emirate today, for to understand the past is to better comprehend the present.

He tells the story of Dubai with a clarity and simplicity that is a joy to follow. I particularly liked the evocation of Dubai in the 1950s before the electric light and abolition of slavery (which only came in 1963).

At night the city was so dark that ships and aircraft could not see it. Without air-conditioning residents slept on the roof for cool in the summer. Dubai was as backward as any coastal town in Africa today.

It reminded me of when I went back to the UK as an expatriate for the first time in 1996 and met an old family friend (Bob Williams, the architect who designed our family home) and he recalled being stationed in Dubai during the Second World War.

`What on earth are you doing in Dubai,' asked an incredulous eighty year old. `There is nothing there.'

His recollection was accurate. Dubai in the Second World War was down to 7,000 residents, the majority living in huts made out of palm leaves. People were eating lizards, locusts and leaves, and some actually starved.

Square that with `The Story of the World's Fastest Growing City' that Mr. Kane so admirably describes. It is progress of a kind seldom seen in human history and at a speed beyond belief.

How on earth did Dubai transform itself into a modern, multicultural metropolis of 1.5 million souls? Mr. Krane highlights visionary leadership, political stability and huge investment in infrastructure projects thought to be completely insane at the time. Friendliness, tolerance of foreigners and putting business interest first came a close second.

Of course, you have to inject oil money into that recipe for success. Dubai seems to have had just the right amount of oil money to get things going but not enough to ruin it. Today Dubai serves an oil-rich region but is oil-poor itself.

Personally I find this ultimate rags-to-riches tale compelling and it still works, as I explain in my own book `Opportunity Dubai: Making a Fortune in the Middle East' which is also available on Amazon.