One day last week the Lebanese woke up to new traffic laws, supported by a media and law-enforcement campaign. This news, which may seem to be the least important of the week’s headlines, has inspired me to write about traffic. In fact no other factor of life in Beirut is more complex or emotional or […]
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Her name was Sonya Aharonian. Many people knew her in Beirut as one of the finest piano teachers available, and, by some streak of luck, we who were new in the country had engaged her to teach our nine-year-old son. All we knew was that we dropped him at her house in West Beirut, ran […]
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Early in 1975 one of my sons was standing at a municipal bus stop on the Corniche, waiting for a bus to take him home to our area, called Musaitbeh, after a long day at school—the American Community School of Beirut. Beside him on the curb a Lebanese youth also waited. The two of them […]
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In my book there is a story called “John and Elena.” Elena was a pretty young Lebanese woman, a friend of ours. John was an American Marine from Minnesota. The two of them were the poignant center of my account of an event that shook both Lebanon and America and has not ended even yet. […]
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