Author Description

"In this memoir Jean Said Makdisi chronicles the unsung private histories of three generations of women in her family." "Set against a backdrop of political upheaval in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and the United States, the story begins and ends with the author's own experience of raising a family in Beirut during the agonising fratricide of the Lebanese civil war; it delves deep into the past to uncover her grandmother's early childhood in Ottoman Syria, and her mother's experience of urban modernization in the Arab world."--Jacket.