"This deeply moving book is the story of love, or rather of two kinds of love closely intertwined…‘It all came to an end today,’ is Ann’s entry in her diary for the fateful day, 18 January 1984… It is good to know that it did not all come to an end for her."—Albert Hourani, from the Foreword
"Ann Kerr has lived a life of romance, danger, and tragedy, today's headlines against a background of Arabian Nights. She tells her gripping story with love and courage. I thoroughly enjoyed this book."—John Chancellor, News Commentator
"A moving story of love and loss, told with a lyrical simplicity. . . . She leaves us with detailed pictures of what has been loved and lost: Malcolm Kerr, and the old days of carefree hope in Lebanon."—Helena Cobban, Columnist and Journalist
"Many will remember the day in January 1984 when Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, was assassinated. . . . Now his widow has written an evocative, moving memoir. . . . Along the way we learn as well of a remarkable, courageous woman."—Foreign Affairs
Description
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.
About the Author
Ann Zwicker Kerr, the coordinator of the Fulbright Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, serves as trustee of the American University of Beirut and escorts study tours to the Arab World for the National Council on U.S.—Arab Relations.
September 1996