Yemen is the dark horse of the Middle East. Every so often it enters the headlines for one alarming reason or another--links with al-Qaeda, kidnapped Westerners, explosive population growth--then sinks into obscurity again. But, as Victoria Clark argues in this riveting book, we ignore Yemen at our peril. The poorest state in the Arab world, it is still dominated by its tribal makeup and has become a perfect breeding ground for insurgent and terrorist movements.

Clark returns to the country where she was born to discover a perilously fragile state that deserves more of our...