Amal Ghandour - This Arab Life

This Arab Life is an intimate and honest exploration of a rising Arab generation's descent into silence. Personal and panoramic, granular and sweeping, the book offers a raw account of the unremitting 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 a mirror to herself and her fellow travelers. In doing so, she threads a generational tale with grit, color, and nuance.

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.

Editorial Reviews:

Born of Lebanese parents and having spent most of her formative years in Jordan from the 1960s through to the early twenty-first century, Amal Ghandour was part of a generation that saw and experienced the unsparing tide of Arab politics and its unhappy consequences. Amal's family, including her father, had moved to Jordan after her father was sentenced to death in Lebanon. From the perspective of a member of the upper classes in her society, which was Amal's background, she gives a lucid account of her life and encounters as she grew up in the Levant region in This Arab Life: A Generation's Journey Into Silence. Get yourself Amal's memoir to find out more.

Amal Ghandour's memoir took me through an eventful and emotional ride that was riddled with heart-wrenching, agonizing, and yet at the same time, gratifying and witty anecdotes. She paints a perfect picture of what her childhood involved, and most importantly what it felt like growing up as an Arab girl. She captures the mood and setting of her Arabian homeland, enunciating the tension that pervaded the social and political norms of the region. Amal addresses many sensitive topics that span religion, politics, and family. She graces her narration with pictures and quotes which made the reading experience engaging. This Arab Life will appeal to enthusiasts of culture and politics.- Keith Mbuya

Community development specialist and author Ghandour reflects on her life growing up amid the political tumult of the Middle East and her generation's response to it.

The author was born in Lebanon in 1962, but when she was only 5 months old, her family was compelled to flee the country for Jordan when her father, Ali, was sentenced to death by the Lebanese state for his alleged involvement in an attempted coup. She was raised in Amman and experienced a peculiar kind of stability in the wake of its civil war, which finally settled into an "ugly memory." Still, there were always paroxysms of unrest-so many, in fact, that they became nearly indistinguishable from the normal rhythms of life and led to a kind of acquiescent "atrophy," as the author puts it. Ghandour's experience was colored by her own privilege, which provided her family with a means of escape and her with an education in the United States that afforded her a taste of "unencumbered aliveness." However, the author also tells of being plagued by the "listlessness" of a generation that came of "political age" in the 1980s but had allowed itself to be silenced-a predicament that Ghandour affectingly portrays in these pages. Specifically, her account includes an astute interpretation of the uprisings that roiled the Arab world in 2011-the shock of their promise as well as their disappointments: "I don't know if my generation understood the meaning of what we saw.or if we knew, were at a loss about our options, and so decided to sell out." Over the course of this memoir, her prose is poetically precise and as sharp as her encounter with cultural and philosophical ambivalence permits. Overall, this is a disarmingly candid memoir in which Ghandour takes herself and her entire generation to task for the manner in which they may have been complicit in the Arab world's political failures. As such, it's a gripping remembrance and one that's as clear as it is dramatic.

An unflinching depiction of an author's complex international experiences.- Kirkus Reviews

Amal Ghandour - This Arab Life.epub

Amal Ghandour - This Arab Life.epub