The fifteen-year civil war in Lebanon has become almost a natural state of affairs in Beirut, and by all accounts, it has made life for the city's residents nasty, mean, brutish, and short. Almost weekly, the world press reports an artillery duel, a kidnapping, or a hideous atrocity, and yet, despite all the coverage, the actual human story is frequently missing. That need was part of the reason Jean Said Makdisi, an English professor at Beirut University College, began writing a series of vignettes about what it is like to live this kind of existence in a war torn capital.
Makdisi was not born in Beirut but has made it her home for nearly two decades. Her memoir allows us to meet the people surviving under these conditions. Even more remarkable, it shows us how an urban community can adapt to barbarity without succumbing to it.
The following excerpt from Beirut Fragments follows Makdisi and her family as they endure an eleven-hour artillery shelling, including direct hits on the roof of their shelter. Afterward she takes stock of the damage - both physical and emotional. Following the excerpt are commentaries on the book by legal scholar Mary Jane Deeb and Middle East historian Daniel Pipes. Deeb finds the book to be a moving testimony to the suffering - and the inspired survival - of innocent people. Pipes, on the other hand, considers the book marred by stridently anti-Israeli bias.
Biased or not, Fragments will no doubt enjoy a long shelf life, if only as a most eloquent brief against war. In Makdisi's words:
Familiarity, they
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