When the bubble burst last year in Dubai, an endlessly reported detail was the number of cars abandoned -- some supposedly with apology notes stuck to the windshields -- by debt-burdened foreigners fleeing an economy in free fall. Now the German impresario hired to oversee the emirate's ambitious cultural plans has also quit his post, leaving behind not a missive on the Volkswagen Touareg SUV he drove in the desert boomtown, but Dubai Speed, a unique insider's memoir of the grandiose -- and all too fleeting -- attempt to use state power to reinvent a culture.