In 1979, journalist Zuhair al-Jezairy fled Iraq and certain death after openly criticizing Saddam Hussein’s regime. Twenty-five years later he is back and cautiously celebrating the toppling of the hated Ba’ath Party.
In the spring of 1986, Mohamed Makhzangi, an Egyptian doctor, was studying in Kiev. As a result, like thousands of others he found himself living a nuclear nightmare when the Chernobyl plant had a catastrophic meltdown. Blending the realism of journalism with the emotional resonance of fiction, Makhzangi conveys the quiet but steadily mounting atmosphere […]
A tomboy at heart, driven by adventure and a desire to understand what her less privileged compatriots go through, architect and university professor Suad Amiry disguises herself as a man and crosses the Israeli border illegally to seek work in the Israeli town of Petah Tikva. The 18-hour journey that she braves with Murad and […]
Author Mansour Ajami was born during World War II in Saghbine, a poverty-stricken Lebanese village that had remained virtually unchanged since the Middle Ages. His autobiography, The Book of Generations: A Reunion with Memory, traces his adaptation to the culture and thought of twenty-first-century America.
A London-educated Iraqi woman, al-Radi, recounts 10 years in her life, covering the Persian Gulf War in 1991, then the Western embargo on Iraq and finally the years she entitles “exile,” which she spent primarily in Lebanon, occasionally visiting the United States.
Set amidst the political turmoil of the twentieth century, The Olive Grove is a deeply moving account of a Palestinian family’s transition from wealth and comfort to statelessness and poverty. Deborah Rohan documents the Moghrabi family’s fight for survival as they struggle against Ottoman and British occupation and the formation of the state of Israel.