Another collection of wonderful stories about early Dhahran from a veteran of it all. |
To
follow up the success of his first book of short stories Arabian Son, Tim Barger, the imp of Satan
as his mother used to call him, has returned with more stories set in the
almost mythical days of Dhahran in the fifties. A small, bare bones oil company
town surrounded by miles of desert in every direction, it was home to about two thousand American employeess, maybe six hundred families and several hundred
children.
These
tales are about the barely supervised exploits of Tim and his friends as well
as some of the colorful characters of the era: the pioneering Abqaiq housewife
Martha, the driller Clark Randall, the stoic Gil Strader, and the legendary
John Ames.
His
stories take you to places that few have even imagined. He offers a glimpse of
the often unseen: the pure, but orchestrated chaos of the used car suq in
Riyadh, the solemn quiet at the bottom of a 50 feet deep artesian well in
Qatif, the rocky slopes of Jebel Shamaal or the splendor of Half Moon Bay at
night with a crackling camp fire and a full moon rising.
Careless can mean care free, “without a care in the world,” but it is mostly used to describe reckless decision making i.e. stupidity. Barger was both care free and prone to ill-conceived adventures in which the only possible upside was that he would survive to tell the tale. And he has.
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