PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Oona Frawley is a lecturer in the Department of English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She is the author of Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia in Twentieth-Century Irish Literature and the editor of Memory Ireland Volume I: History and Modernity, A New and Complex Sensations, New Dubliners, and Selected Essays of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill.
Ida Staudt's memoir presents a fascinating window into Iraqi society in an era of profound change. Her pages abound with captivating vignettes of the human diversity of 'old Baghdad' with its Mandean silversmiths and Kurdish porters, a Turkish belly dancer at a Jewish wedding, even a visit with King Faisal's Circassian grandmother. With a keen and sometimes prescient eye, Staudt also chronicles how the combined forces of technology, the discovery of oil, and the Second World War were beginning to transform the Iraq she knew and loved.-- Joel Walker, author of The Legend of Mar Qardagh: Narrative and Christian Heroism in Late Antique Iraq Shows how an intelligent, energetic American woman from the early twentieth century interacted open-mindedly and warmheartedly with a very different culture, and it gives us a sense of what Iraq could have become, if history had taken another course.-- Judith Caesar, author of Writing Off the Beaten Track: Reflections on the Meaning of Travel and Culture in the Middle East
