"Midnight Express" was also criticized for its unfavorable portrayal of Turkish people. In her 1991 book "Turkish Reflections: A Biography of Place", Mary Lee Settle wrote: "The Turks I saw in "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Midnight Express" were like cartoon caricatures, compared to the people I had known and lived among for three of the happiest years of my life." Pauline Kael, in reviewing the film for "The New Yorker", commented, "This story could have happened in almost any country, but if Billy Hayes had planned to be arrested to get the maximum commercial benefit from it, where else could he get the advantages of a Turkish jail? Who wants to defend Turks? (They don’t even constitute enough of a movie market for Columbia Pictures to be concerned about how they are represented.)" One reviewer, writing for "World Film Directors", wrote: ""Midnight Express" is 'more violent, as a national hate-film than anything I can remember', 'a cultural form that narrows horizons, confirming the audience’s meanest fears and prejudices and resentments'."