THIS ARAB LIFE: A Generation’s Journey into Silence
by Amal Ghandour
This Arab Life is an intimate, searching, and honest exploration of a rising Arab generation’s descent into silence in the 1980s. At once personal and panoramic, granular and sweeping, the book offers a raw account of unremitting Arab mire that anticipates the region’s present-day chaos.
In an unusual twist, the author, a daughter of the Levant who claims Jordan and Lebanon as her homes, locates her own privileged class in this painful history and holds up a mirror to herself and her fellow travelers. In doing so, she threads a generational tale with grit, color, and nuance; a tale where individual genius thrives in the shadow of collective inadequacy and wholesale submission is tempered by countless small victories.
The beginning of This Arab Life is the Summer of 1973, in Amman; the end of it is January 2022, in Beirut. But time and place in the narrative are elastic, by turns distant and aged, near and in the moment.
