Come With Me from Lebanon

Ann Kerr's is a personal account of an American family during the most tumultuous years of Beirut's political strife. It begins with the tragic assassination of her husband Malcolm Kerr, one of the most respected scholars of Middle East Studies, in 1984, seventeen months after he became president of the American University of Beirut. She retraces in detail the events that brought them to the Middle East, and reaches back into her childhood to describe a lifelong affinity for Lebanon. For a young American woman caring for a family in Lebanon and Egypt, life was like nothing she had ever known, but Ann Kerr approached it with a sense of adventure, which would help her deal with the beauty, chaos, and the ultimate horror of life during the country's most volatile years of the last three decades. The personal saga of her family and the events surrounding her husband's untimely death merge with the political episodes that have shaped U.S.-Arab relations since World War II. Kerr describes with humor and grace her life within a culture that most Americans perceive as strange and hostile, but which she loved from the beginning. Her story is deeply moving, whether it describes her junior year at the American University of Beirut or raising a family in Lebanon and Egypt or experiencing a reverse culture shock when returning to the United States with her husband. Through entries from her diaries and excerpts from his letters, Kerr examines her husband's ideals and goals to promote reconciliation among the myriad factions that comprise Lebanese society. The book contains much information about Islam and the cultural diversity of Lebanon's religious groups, while supplying an essential historicalperspective of the American University of Beirut. Come with Me from Lebanon will be of interest to Middle East scholars, as well as to the general reader. Since it examines the problems women faced in a culture with different expectations about women's roles, this book will have a significant place in women's studies programs.