Book excerpt: 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.