The author served in the British diplomatic corps in the Gulf, Syria, and Iran and embellished the present work with many of her own photos. Tweedy highlights the daily life of the rapidly developing Middle East to her target audience - young people for whom, as her publisher notes, conventional geography books had become stale. In the book, the culture of Bahrain and Oman are covered in some detail. Tweedy had published previously on Bahrain and the Arabian Gulf in the early 1950s, and she released her memoirs in 1976.