By Mai Yamani.  Brookings Institution Press; 176 pages; $19.95.
RIIA-Chatham House; £14.95   Looking for advice books EPA  THERE
are worse fates than being born a Saudi. So long as you obey the
tiresome rules (exceedingly tiresome if you happen to be
female), you can be reasonably assured of food, education,
health care and comfort. But young Saudis peer into the future
with more trepidation than their elders. Change has come so
rapidly. Their grandparents remember austere nomadic days, when
the family or tribe meant all. Their parents, happy
beneficiaries of a state with no bottom to its purse, have been
programmed to expect life to get ever better. But the young (and
more than half the population is under 20) sense that the
munificence is ending. Old certainties have begun to crumble.
Mai Yamani, a fairly rare bird herself as a respected female
Saudi academic, has produced an even rarer study, tapping a
source that most westerners know nothing whatsoever about. A
social anthropologist, she interviewed you