A Diamond in the Desert by Jo Tatchell and Dubai by Jim Krane: review

Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, is a city of extraordinary numbers. Over the past 50 years, a ramshackle desert outpost has become, thanks to eight per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves, the richest thicket of skyscrapers on earth. Abu Dhabi has an estimated $1trn invested abroad and its 420,000 citizens, led by the Al Nahyan family, are worth an average of $17m each. Seventy-nine miles up the coast in Dubai, meanwhile, their cousins and rivals the Al Maktoums have created a city with the world’s tallest building, the Burj Dubai, and new archipelagos – including the celebrity-ridden Palm Jumeirah and World islands – dredged from the Persian Gulf. As Arab investors withdrew from American markets after 9/11, their money flooded into Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Their burgeoning sky and coastlines – and the recent plugging of gaps in shaky Western economies – are the result.

But in the global financial crisis, some, at least, of the wheels have come off the Emirati money machine. Dubai, reliant on the vulnerable industries of tourism, luxury retail, air travel, property and financial services, has been worst hit. Reports emerged of paralysed construction sites and expats abandoning their luxury cars at Dubai International airport. Scrutiny of human rights abuses endured by the huge workforce of migrant labourers has increased. Leaner times have brought a cultural backlash against Dubai’s hedonistic Western workers, with imprisonments for 'immorality’ and 'adultery’. Even Abu Dhabi, cushioned by its oil reserves and less headlong ethos, has suffered.

Jo Tatchell’s A Diamond in the Desert, and Dubai, by the former Associated Press correspondent Jim Krane, tell the stories of the rise and recent falter of these twin desert cities. Tatchell, who lived in Abu Dhabi as a child in the Seventies, has an unusual affection for it – or at least for the few traces of the old town she used to know, 'as enchanting and mutable as the dunes surrounding it’. A Diamond in the Desert is more travelogue than straightforward history, as she meanders between former drinking buddies and her father’s old business associates, trying to discover why the city is buying into culture, building branches of the Louvre, Guggenheim and Sorbonne, and creating national museums and arts centres.