The shock of the new

Rich, secretive and proud to be different, Saudi Arabia has always aroused a mix of curiosity and unease, as five new books on the kingdom show

THE past few years have uncapped an unprecedented gush of anxious, often hostile writing about Saudi Arabia. Two statistics explain why. First, three-quarters of the September 11th hijackers were Saudis, and second, the kingdom contains a quarter of the world’s known oil reserves. Those numbers imply that the main source of the most important global commodity, and one that has become in shorter supply, is a land that also incubates monsters; in other words, the world economy relies increasingly on a country that may be dangerously unreliable.

Now consider a worse scenario. What if that Saudi oil was really not so abundant after all? This is the possibility proposed by Matthew Simmons, a respected Texan energy investment analyst, in