This Arab Life
A Generation’s Journey Into Silence
by Amal Ghandour
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Pub Date Oct 11 2022 | Archive Date Oct 31 2022
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Description
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In her upcoming memoir, Amal Ghandour reflects on her life as a privileged member of the “silent” Arab generation that came of political age in the 1980s, seeking clarity from a twin excavation of the self and the world that gave shape to it. In doing so, she draws from personal histories and larger political and cultural trends to thread a generational tale of seeming early promise, cascading defeats, and devastating finales.
“This Arab Life: A Generation’s Journey into Silence” (Bold Story Press, Oct. 11, 2022) unfolds through a series of juxtapositions of private tragedies and epochal events, places and geographies, characters and lived experiences, innermost truths and shared realities. Through such depictions, the author pulls together half a century of Levantine and Arab history, even as she proceeds to disentangle it for answers.
“This Arab Life” begins in Amman in the summer of 1973 and concludes in Beirut in December 2021. But the narrative encompasses a world by turns distant and faded, near and vital.
*This book file is not to be forwarded to any additional party*
A Note From the Publisher
Ghandour was special adviser to Columbia University’s Global Centers, Middle East, from 2014 to 2017, sits on The Women Creating Change Leadership Council of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference; the Board of Trustees of International College, Lebanon; the Board of Directors of Ruwwad, Lebanon; The Board of Directors of Synaps, a public interest research institute; and has served on the Board of Directors of The Arab Human Rights Fund (2011-2014). She holds an MS in International Policy from Stanford University and a BSFS from Georgetown University.
Advance Praise
“Unsparing of herself as ‘informant,’ in a book that is at once painful and a delight to read, Amal Ghandour probes the conscience and circumstances of a small but very influential section of Arab society. Stylish, witty and heartbreaking, this is a unique and critical contribution to our current soul-searching.”
– Ahdaf Soueif, best-selling Egyptian novelist and short story writer, and political and cultural commentator
“Amal Ghandour has written a nostalgic book with glimmers of brilliant personal, social and political observations and probing about Jordan and Lebanon, about wars and longings, about a rich life of upheavals and laments.”
– Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian writer and lawyer, and founder of the human rights organization Al-Haq
“‘This Arab Life is a sweeping retrospective on a generation’s historic complicity in the present travails plaguing the Arab world. The book is, at once, intimate, far-reaching, political, angry, melancholic, funny, and nostalgic. Ghandour’s reflections on her life, and on the decisions taken by her and her peers as they came of age in the eighties and nineties, offers important insight for anyone seeking to understand how we got to where we are today in the region. The book is a cautionary tale of political acquiescence, and one that is, like many Arabs, stuck between an urgent impulse to act, to change, to hope, alongside an overwhelming sense of despair and apathy.”
– Tarek Baconi, author of “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance,” and president of the board of al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network
“The Arab world hasn’t fallen into silence. It has descended, not unlike other parts of the globe, into a logorrhea of reflexive grumbling, vacuous politics, and hopeless nostalgia. Amal Ghandour’s voice pierces through this noise: analytic, female, rebellious, acid yet soothing, if only because so much of the corrosion she describes is just begging for her brand of intellectual rust remover. Ghandour taunts the very elites she belongs to with questions few of the privileged ever ask themselves: Wealth aside, what is our worth? Who are we, as an elite, if we do little more than indulge and free-ride? Her own answers rise from a unique blend of acute insights, touching vignettes, and downright introspection, all caught up in the region’s traumatic historical arc, and bound together by Ghandour’s ever so tight, elegant style.”
—Peter Harling, founder of Synaps, a public interest research Institute
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781954805262 |
| PRICE | $17.99 (USD) |
