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The House of Saud: The Rise and Rule of the Most Powerful Dynasty in the Arab World
By David Holden and Richard Johns. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1982 569 pp. $19.95
Bernard Shaw once commented that three people collaborating on a book was as desirable as three people collaborating on a baby. The House of Saud suffers not only from the unevenness inherent in such a joint effort - aside from the contributions by Holden and Johns, there is a chapter by John Buchan - but from the seeming current wisdom that bulk is equivalent to thought and synthesis so far as Saudi Arabia is concerned. That the result seems incompletely digested, however, does not detract from the story's fascination.
Abdul Aziz Al Saud, the Ibn Saud of Western legend, was heir to a political and religious tradition which sprang from the central plateau of the Arabian peninsula. A giant of a man, he literally hacked his way to the control and stabilization of central Arabia and then expanded that control east, west and south in what, to the Saudis, was a sort of manifest destiny. Holden's chapters, which carry the story through the Second World War, weave Arabian peninsular politics into the larger tapestry of Western interests in the area. The way in which Abdul Aziz moved from...