Bøger udgivet af Harper Perennial

the QueenElizabeth II was not born to be queen. She came into the world on April 21, 1926, the equivalent of the modern Princess Beatrice, first-born daughter of the Duke of York, destined to flutter on the royal fringe. So while Lilibet was brought up with almost religious respect for the crown, there seemed no chance of her inheriting it. Her head was never turned by the personal prospect of grandeur?which is why she would prove so very good at her job. Elizabeth II's lack of ego was to prove the paradoxical secret of her greatness. For more than thirty years, acclaimed author and royal biographer Robert Lacey has been gathering material from members of the Queen's inner circle?her friends, relatives, private secretaries, and prime ministers. Now, in The Queen, Lacey offers a life of the celebrated monarch, told in six succinct chapters, accentuated by elegant color and black-and-white photographs that capture the distinctive flavor of passing eras and reveal how Elizabeth II adapted?or, on occasions, regally declined to adapt?to changing times.

On August 19, 1953, the American and British intelligence agencies launched a desperate coup in Iran against Muhammad Mossadegh, a bedridden seventy-two-year-old man. His crimes had been to flirt with communism and to nationalize his country's oil industry, which for forty years had been in British hands. But the countries that overthrew Mossadegh would, in time, deeply regret siding with his great foe, Shah Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi. Mossadegh was one of the first liberals of the Middle East, a man who wanted friendship with the West?but not slavish dependence.Who was this political guerrilla of noble blood, so adored in the Middle East and so reviled in the West? Schooled in Europe and pitted against dictatorship at home, Mossadegh had become the nation's conscience by the time of the Shah's ascension. Written by our foremost observer of Iran, Patriot of Persia reveals a man who embodied his nation's struggle for freedom and whose life serves as a warning to the White House and Downing Street as they commit to further intervention in a volatile and unpredictable region.

At eighty-five, Teo is ready to retire from the bombast and romance of life as one of the world's most influential choreographers. But when he meets Vivi, a fortyish waitress at a Tel Aviv café, the fires of his youth flare back to life?his passion for a woman's touch, his long-buried anguish at his wartime experiences, and his complex engagement with dance. Vivi's life will change, too, as the warmth of Teo's affection counterbalances her harrowing time as an Israeli soldier in an illicit relationship. For both, their investment in art, and indeed in life itself, will reawaken as the ghosts of their suppressed pasts?from Warsaw to Copenhagen, Berlin to Tel Aviv?cry out for forgiveness and healing.With lustrous prose capturing the grit and fury of history and the breathtaking power of passion, When We Danced on Water is a compelling novel of intimacy and identity, art and ambition, and how love can truly transcend tragedy.

A candid and insightful look at an era and a life through the eyes of one of the most remarkable Americans of the twentieth century, First Lady and humanitarian Eleanor Roosevelt.The daughter of one of New York's most influential families, niece of Theodore Roosevelt, and wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt witnessed some of the most remarkable decades in modern history, as America transitioned from the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, and the Depression to World War II and the Cold War.A champion of the downtrodden, Eleanor drew on her experience and used her role as First Lady to help those in need. Intimately involved in her husband's political life, from the governorship of New York to the White House, Eleanor would become a powerful force of her own, heading women's organizations and youth movements, and battling for consumer rights, civil rights, and improved housing. In the years after FDR's death, this inspiring, controversial, and outspoken leader would become a U.N. Delegate, chairman of the Commission on Human Rights, a newspaper columnist, Democratic Party activist, world-traveler, and diplomat devoted to the ideas of liberty and human rights.This single volume biography brings her into focus through her own words, illuminating the vanished world she grew up, her life with her political husband, and the post-war years when she worked to broaden cooperation and understanding at home and abroad.

Heighten your intuition, connect with deceased loved ones, and surpass the psychological roadblocks holding you back with psychic medium Rebecca Rosen's fresh and hip prescriptive program, a unique and refreshing blend of self-help wisdom and psychic insight.In Spirited, readers can learn how to dig into their past to identify the root of the "damage" that's keeping them from living their best lives. In her colorful and youthfully vibrant voice, medium-to-the-stars Rebecca Rosen shows us how to draw on the power of our intuitive gifts to connect with spirit energy?loved ones who have passed?to provide the clarity necessary to master real-life issues, including relationships, job fulfillment, finances, and body image.

A suspenseful and necessary new translation of Sophocles' provocative drama that demystifies the death of a warrior and challenges the civic value of Greece's heroic legacyAchilles is dead. Aias, Greece's next greatest warrior, should inherit his armor, but Agamemnon and Menelaos award it to Odysseus. Enraged, Aias sets out to kill them all, but Athena deludes him into slaughtering the war spoil of the Greek army: defenseless sheep, goats, oxen, and herdsmen. When Aias realizes what he has done, his shame is irremediable. His only recourse is one final, desperate act that will leave all who depended on him to fend for themselves. In place of a heroic ethos in which everyone relies on one towering individual, the survivors embrace a social ethos based on the interdependence of all?including, here, a speechless child. In this masterful translation, James Scully puts readers and actors in touch with the performative dynamism of the drama, which resonates with issues crucial to our own time. This rendering enables the emotions and arguments of Sophocles' era to register on the pulse of a contemporary audience.

Rebecca is young, lost, and beautiful. A gifted artist, she seeks solace and inspiration in the Mediterranean heat of Athens?trying to understand who she is and how she can love without fear. George has come to Athens to learn ancient languages after growing up in New England boarding schools and Ivy League colleges. He has no close relationships with anyone and spends his days hunched over books or wandering the city in a drunken stupor.Henry is in Athens to dig. An accomplished young archaeologist, he devotedly uncovers the city's past as a way to escape his own, which holds a secret that not even his doting parents can talk about....And then, with a series of chance meetings, Rebecca, George, and Henry are suddenly in flight, their lives brighter and clearer than ever, as they fall headlong into a summer that will forever define them in the decades to come.

What does it mean to be authentic?The demand for authenticity?the honest or the real?is one of the most powerful movements in contempo-rary life, influencing our moral outlook, political views, and consumer behavior. Yet according to Andrew Potter, when examined closely, our fetish for ?authentic? lifestyles or experiences is actually a form of exclusionary status seeking. The result, he argues, is modernity's malaise: a competitive, self-absorbed individualism that ultimately erodes genuine relationships and true community.Weaving together threads of pop culture, history, and philosophy, The Authenticity Hoax reveals how our misguided pursuit of the authentic merely exacerbates the artificiality of contemporary life that we decry. In his defiant, brilliant critique, Andrew Potter offers a way forward to a meaningful individualism that makes peace with the modern world.

Winner of the 2016 Alex AwardBest Book of 2015 --Kansas City StarIn this intricate novel of psychological suspense, a fatal discovery near the high school ignites a witch-hunt in a Southeast Texas refinery town, unearthing communal and family secrets that threaten the lives of the town's girls.In Port Sabine, the air is thick with oil, superstition reigns, and dreams hang on making a winning play. All eyes are on Mercy Louis, the star of the championship girls' basketball team. Mercy seems destined for greatness, but the road out of town is riddled with obstacles. There is her grandmother, Evelia, a strict evangelical who has visions of an imminent Rapture and sees herself as the keeper of Mercy's virtue. There are the cryptic letters from Charmaine, the mother who abandoned Mercy at birth. And then there's Travis, the boy who shakes the foundation of her faith.At the periphery of Mercy's world floats team manager Illa Stark, a lonely wallflower whose days are spent caring for a depressed mother crippled in a refinery accident. Like the rest of the town, Illa is spellbound by Mercy's beauty and talent, but a note discovered in Mercy's gym locker reveals that her life may not be as perfect as it appears.The last day of school brings the disturbing discovery, and as summer unfolds and the police investigate, every girl becomes a suspect. When Mercy collapses on the opening night of the season, Evelia prophesies that she is only the first to fall, and soon, other girls are afflicted by the mysterious condition, sending the town into a tailspin, and bringing Illa and Mercy together in an unexpected way.Evocative and unsettling, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis charts the downfall of one town's golden girl while exploring the brutality and anxieties of girlhood in America.

Drawing from the horizons of science, today's leading thinkers reveal the hidden threats nobody is talking about--and expose the false fears everyone else is distracted by.What should we be worried about? That is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org ("The world's smartest website"--The Guardian), posed to the planet's most influential minds. He asked them to disclose something that, for scientific reasons, worries them--particularly scenarios that aren't on the popular radar yet. Encompassing neuroscience, economics, philosophy, physics, psychology, biology, and more--here are 150 ideas that will revolutionize your understanding of the world.Steven Pinker uncovers the real risk factors for war ¿ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi peers into the coming virtual abyss ¿ Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek laments our squandered opportunities to prevent global catastrophe ¿ Seth Lloyd calculates the threat of a financial black hole ¿ Alison Gopnik on the loss of childhood ¿ Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains why firefighters understand risk far better than economic "experts" ¿ Matt Ridley on the alarming re-emergence of superstition ¿ Daniel C. Dennett and george dyson ponder the impact of a major breakdown of the Internet ¿ Jennifer Jacquet fears human-induced damage to the planet due to "the Anthropocebo Effect" ¿ Douglas Rushkoff fears humanity is losing its soul ¿ Nicholas Carr on the "patience deficit" ¿ Tim O'Reilly foresees a coming new Dark Age ¿ Scott Atran on the homogenization of human experience ¿ Sherry Turkle explores what's lost when kids are constantly connected ¿ Kevin Kelly outlines the looming "underpopulation bomb" ¿ Helen Fisher on the fate of men ¿ Lawrence Krauss dreads what we don't know about the universe ¿ Susan Blackmore on the loss of manual skills ¿ Kate Jeffery on the death of death ¿ plus J. Craig Venter, Daniel Goleman, Virginia Heffernan, Sam Harris, Brian Eno, Martin Rees, and more

On a blustery night, detectives from the Massachusetts State Police knocked on Amy Gleason's door. Gleason, along with fellow nurse Kim Hoy, had helped a patient deal with pain and suffering at the end of her life. Now the patient was dead, and the two nurses were being investigated for murder. Both believed they had done the right thing, but they had no idea what it would cost them.In this captivating and powerful true story, Dr. Lewis M. Cohen uses the experiences of Gleason, Hoy, and the nursing assistant who accused them of murder to explore what happens when decisions about end-of-life care shift from the hospital to the courtroom and the church. Tracing this issue from the uproar over Terri Schiavo's feeding tube to the controversial figure of Jack Kevorkian, and to the legitimate threat of serial killer medical professionals, Cohen goes behind the scenes on both sides of this debate. He examines how advances in modern medicine have given us tremendous tools for prolonging life but have also forced us to address how we treat patients who are dying and suffering.

In this electric and provocative debut novel, Amber Tamblyn blends genres of poetry and prose with elements of suspense to give shape to the shocking narratives of victims of sexual violence, and maps the destructive ways in which society perpetuates rape culture.A violent serial rapist, who goes by the name Maude, is on the loose. She hunts for men at bars and online?the place doesn't matter, neither does the man. Her victims then must grapple with the aftermath of their assault?doubts from the police, feelings of shame and alienation from their friends and family, and the haunting of a horrible woman who becomes the phantom on which society pro-jects its greatest fears, fascinations, and even misogyny. All the while, the police are without leads, and the media hounds the victims, publicly dissecting the details of their attack.As the years pass, these men learn to heal by banding together and finding a space to raise their voices. Told in alternating viewpoints, signature to each voice and experience of the victim, these pages crackle with emotion ranging from horror to breathtaking empathy.As bold as it is timely, Any Man is a tribute to those who have lived through the nightmare of sexual assault and asserts how the power of speaking out can change not only the life of survivors, but so too the world around them.

In this eye-opening, authoritative biography, Adam Begley offers a captivating portrait of John Updike, the author who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, and who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing "middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities." Updike explores the stages of the writer's pilgrim's progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Begley examines how Updike's fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life?including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his firsthand experience of the "adulterous society" he was credited with exposing in the bestselling novel Couples. With a sharp critical sensibility, Begley probes Updike's best-loved works and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page.Candid, intimate, and utterly absorbing, Updike is a masterful biography of a national treasure whose writing continues to resonate like no one else's.

In the winter of 1897, midwife Elspeth Howell arrives at her isolated farmstead in upstate New York to discover an unthinkable crime. The only survivor is her twelve-year-old son, Caleb, who joins her in mourning the tragedy and planning its reprisal.Their long journey leads them to a roughhewn lake town, defined by the violence of both its landscape and its inhabitants. There Caleb is forced into a brutal adulthood as he slowly discovers truths about his family he never suspected, and Elspeth must confront the terrible urges and unceasing temptations that have haunted her for years.Throughout it all, the love between mother and son serves as the only shield against a merciless world.

Set in America and Europe, David John's Flight from Berlin is a masterful blend of fact and fiction, drama and suspense?a riveting story of love, courage, and betrayal that culminates in a breathtaking race against the forces of evil.August 1936: The eyes of the world are on Berlin, where Adolf Hitler is using the Olympic Games to showcase his powerful new regime. British journalist Richard Denham is determined to report the truth: that the carefully staged spectacle masks the Nazis' ruthless brutality. Sparks fly when the cynical newspaperman meets the beautiful and rebellious American socialite Eleanor Emerson, an athlete covering the Games as a celebrity columnist. Their chance encounter at a reception thrown by Joseph Goebbels leads them into a treacherous game of espionage. At stake: a mysterious dossier that threatens the leadership of the Third Reich. While Berlin welcomes the world, the Nazi capital becomes a terrifying place for Richard and Eleanor. Drawn together by danger and passion, they must execute a daring plan to survive. But one wrong move could be their last.

New York Times Editor's ChoiceTwenty-two-year-old Galen lives with his emotionally dependent mother in a secluded house outside Sacramento, surviving on the family's trust fund--money that his aunt, Helen, and seventeen-year-old cousin, Jennifer, are determined to get their hands on. A New Age believer who considers himself an old soul, Galen yearns for transformation but is powerless to stop the manic binges that overtake him. He dreams of shedding his clinging mother and is obsessed with thoughts of the boldly flirtatious Jennifer. But when the family takes a trip to a cabin in the Sierras, Galen discovers just how far he will go to attain the transcendence he craves.

Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. When he leaves his lucrative law career for a foreign correspondent post in a Portuguese backwater with a homegrown terrorist movement, Edgar recognizes Barrington Saddler, the disappeared reporter he's replacing, as the larger-than-life character he longs to emulate. Yet all is not as it appears. Os Soldados Ousados de Barba?"The Daring Soldiers of Barba" ?have been blowing up the rest of the world for years in order to win independence for a province so dismal and backward that you couldn't give the rathole away. So why, with Barrington vanished, do incidents claimed by the "SOB" suddenly dry up? A droll, playful novel, The New Republic addresses terrorism with a deft, tongue-in- cheek touch while also pressing a more intimate question: What makes particular people so magnetic, while the rest of us inspire a shrug?

From the author of the international bestseller The Bride Stripped Bare comes the raw and resonant story of a middle-aged wife and mother who attempts to reclaim her lost sense of self by exploring the memory of an old love affair, the consequences of which have remained unresolved for years. Nikki Gemmell is "one of the few truly original voices to emerge in a long time" (Time Out New York), and With My Body is a unique and captivating novel. Poetic and boldly, unabashedly sensual, Gemmell's gorgeous writing and explosive content evoke the seductive power of The Secret Life Of Catherine M, Damage, and The Story of O, but this instant classic bears a modern insight into present-day sexuality and that could only come from the intimate and invigorating voice of Nikki Gemmell.

On April 14, 1912, as one thousand men prepared to die, J. Bruce Ismay, the owner of the RMS Titanic, jumped into a lifeboat filled with women and children and rowed away to safety. He survived the ship's sinking?but his life and reputation would never recover.Examining Ismay through the lens of Joseph Conrad's prophetic novel Lord Jim?and using Ismay's letters to the beautiful Marion Thayer, a first-class passenger with whom he had fallen in love during the voyage?biographer Frances Wilson explores the shattered shipowner's desperate need to tell his story, to make sense of the horror of it all, and to find a way of living with the consciousness of his lost honor. For those who survived the Titanic, the world was never the same. But as Wilson superbly demonstrates, we all have our own Titanics, and we all need to find ways of surviving them.

The news arrives in a letter to his sister, Nannerl, in December 1791. But the message carries more than word of Nannerl's brother's demise. Two months earlier, Mozart confided to his wife that his life was rapidly drawing to a close . . . and that he knew he had been poisoned.In Vienna to pay her final respects, Nannerl soon finds herself ensnared in a web of suspicion and intrigue?as the actions of jealous lovers, sinister creditors, rival composers, and Mozart's Masonic brothers suggest that dark secrets hastened the genius to his grave. As Nannerl digs deeper into the mystery surrounding her brother's passing, Mozart's black fate threatens to overtake her as well.Transporting readers to the salons and concert halls of eighteenth-century Austria, Mozart's Last Aria is a magnificent historical mystery that pulls back the curtain on a world of soaring music, burning passion, and powerful secrets.

In this New York Times Notable Book from one of today's most acclaimed writers, two lives stretched between two cities converge in a chance meeting that will irrevocably change their lives. "Hadley is a supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence, someone who goes well beyond surfaces." --New York Times Book ReviewUnsettled by the recent death of his mother, Paul sets out in search of Pia, his daughter from his first marriage, who has disappeared into the labyrinth of London. Discovering her pregnant and living illegally in a run-down council flat with a pair of Polish siblings, Paul is entranced by Pia's excitement at living on the edge. Abandoning his second wife and their children in Wales, he joins her to begin a new life in the heart of London.Cora, meanwhile, is running in the opposite direction, back to Cardiff, to the house she has inherited from her parents. She is escaping her marriage, and the constrictions and disappointments of her life in London. But there is a deeper reason why she cannot stay with her decent Civil Service husband; the aftershocks of which she hasn't fully come to terms with herself.Connecting both stories is the London train, and a chance meeting that will have immediate and far-reaching consequences for both Paul and Cora.

First in To Kill a Mockingbird and fifty-five years later with Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee's beloved characters resonate with readers long after the books are finished. To Kill a Mockingbird, published in July 1960, has become a touchstone in American literary and social history. It may well be our national novel.With Scout, Atticus & Boo, Mary McDonagh Murphy commemorates more than half a century of To Kill a Mockingbird by exploring the novel's history and influence. In compelling interviews, Anna Quindlen, Tom Brokaw, Oprah Winfrey, James Patterson, James McBride, Scott Turow, Wally Lamb, Andrew Young, Richard Russo, Adriana Trigiani, Rick Bragg, Jon Meacham, Allan Gurganus, Diane McWhorter, Lee Smith, Rosanne Cash, and others reflect on their own personal connections to Lee's masterpiece, what it means to them?then and now?and how it has affected their lives and careers.

A knight in the Holy Land. A woman in the frozen north. A war that kept them apart... Among the last bastion of God's holy warriors determined to save Jerusalem from the Muslims, Arn Magnusson of the Knights Templar is renowned as a man of compassion, strength, and faith, even among the enemy Saracens?Saladin and his Muslim followers. Yet, neither time nor distance can lessen Arn's pain of separation from his beloved Cecilia; confined to a cloister back home in western Götaland, his betrothed, the mother of their newborn son, is a pawn in a war between clans vying for control of the crown.And when an accident of fate brings together Arn and Saladin, an unlikely friendship is forged that will alter the course of the Templar knight's life, and the history of Jerusalem itself.

Nancy Mitford meets Nora Ephron in the pages of The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, Helene Hanff's delightful travelogue about her "bucket list" trip to LondonWhen devoted Anglophile Helene Hanff is invited to London for the English publication of 84, Charing Cross Road--in which she shares two decades of correspondence with Frank Doel, a British bookseller who became a dear friend--she can hardly believe her luck. Frank is no longer alive, but his widow and daughter, along with enthusiastic British fans from all walks of life, embrace Helene as an honored guest. Eager hosts, including a famous actress and a retired colonel, sweep her up in a whirlwind of plays and dinners, trips to Harrod's, and wild jaunts to their favorite corners of the countryside. A New Yorker who isn't afraid to speak her mind, Helene Hanff delivers an outsider's funny yet fabulous portrait of idiosyncratic Britain at its best. And whether she is walking across the Oxford University courtyard where John Donne used to tread, visiting Windsor Castle, or telling a British barman how to make a real American martini, Helene always wears her heart on her sleeve. The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street is not only a witty account of two different worlds colliding but also a love letter to England and its literary heritage--and a celebration of the written word's power to sustain us, transport us, and unite us.

A Wildly Funny and Shockingly True Compendium of the Bad Boys (and Girls) of Western LiteratureRock stars, rappers, and actors haven't always had a monopoly on misbehaving. There was a time when authors fought with both words and fists, a time when poets were the ones living fast and dying young. This witty, insightful, and wildly entertaining narrative profiles the literary greats who wrote generation-defining classics such as The Great Gatsby and On the Road while living and loving like hedonistic rock icons, who were as likely to go on epic benders as they were to hit the bestseller lists. Literary Rogues turns back the clock to consider these historical (and, in some cases, living) legends, including Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Hunter S. Thompson, and Bret Easton Ellis. Brimming with fasci- nating research, Literary Rogues is part nostalgia, part literary analysis, and a wholly raucous celebration of brilliant writers and their occasionally troubled legacies.

"ThisBeautiful Life is a gripping, potent and blisteringly well-written story offamily, dilemma, and consequence. . . . I read this book with white-knuckledurgency, and I finished it in tears. Helen Schulman is an absolutely brilliantnovelist." --Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, LoveTheevents of a single night shatter one family's sense of security and identity inthis provocative and deeply affecting domestic drama from Helen Schulman, theacclaimed author of A Day at the Beach and Out of Time. In thetradition of Lionel Shriver, Sue Miller, and Laura Moriarty, Schulman crafts abrilliantly observed portrait of parenting and modern life, cunningly exploringour most deeply-held convictions and revealing the enduring strengths thatemerge in the face of crisis.

Winston Churchill rages against time and his own mortality, in conflict with friend and foe alike, in this tumultuous political drama about his last ten years of public life.Churchill Defiant is a gripping, fast-paced narrative of bare-knuckle politics, of life-and-death decisions, of old grudges and fresh blame.This is Churchill in close-up?a vivid, deeply poignant portrait of the great man at his most maddening and devious, but also at his most human and defiant.

"A keen sociological eye for class and ideology; an understanding of the contradictory impulses of the human heart; an ability to conjure a place, a mood and a time through seemingly matter-of-fact descriptions." -- Michiko Kakutani, New York TimesShocking, intimate, often uncomfortably honest, Adore reaffirms Doris Lessing's unrivaled ability to capture the truth of the human condition.Roz and Lil have been best friends since childhood. But their bond stretches beyond familiar bounds when these middle-aged mothers fall in love with each other's teenage sons--taboo-shattering passions that last for years, until the women end them, vowing to have a respectable old age.

"It's an admirable endeavor to have Iraq addressed by someone who is in so many ways able to approach it from two worlds. . . . Tamara Chalabi has the stuff, in every sense, that is needful to undertake this." --Christopher HitchensIn the tradition of Jung Chang's Wild Swans and Bhutto Benazir's Reconciliation comes Tamara Chalabi's unique memoir of returning to her family's homeland, Iraq. In this epic story of one daughter's journey through the annals of her family's tumultuous history, Chalabi's powerful voice and piercing vision illuminate her country and its people as never before.Just ten days after Baghdad's fall in 2003, Tamara Chalabi arrived in the city after a lifetime in exile--finally entering the homeland she'd known only through stories and her own imagination.Investigating four generations of her family's history at the forefront of Iraqi society, Chalabi offers a rich portrait of Middle Eastern life and a provocative look at a lost Iraq. Unforgettable characters provide glimpses of the end of the Ottoman Empire, the birth of the Iraqi state, the flowering of "the Paris of the Middle East," and Iraq's descent into chaos. At once intimate and magisterial, Chalabi's memoir of return and reclamation vividly captures the rich history of a country shattered by war and a family that has never forgotten its past.