Report on Come with me from Lebanon by Ann Zwicker Kerr - Book Report/Review Example

Throughout the book, Zwicker replicates on that innocent and fresh time in her emotional memoirs. She spots the elements of planning, chance, and destiny coming at the same time in that pivotal year. This implies that chance meant she could end up in Lebanon rather than in India, the element of planning where she achieved her desired profession as a teacher, while destiny implied that she had met the love of her life, Malcolm Kerr who connected her life to the Middle Eastern People. From this time onwards, this young unusual American family had their lives rotating around Beirut, Santa Monica, and Cairo (Kerr 78).

The book is an individual account of her family during the most chaotic times of Beirut’s political environment. Only seventeen months after Kerr became the American University of Beirut’s president, he was assassinated, leaving behind a history that depicted him as one of the most esteemed scholars of the region. Zwicker traces in detail the occurrences that caused them to move to the Middle East, but does not forget to talk of her childhood to create a true picture of the affinity for Lebanon.

  Life was like living in hell for this young American woman who was left all alone to care for the kids in Egypt and Lebanon. However, she approached the hard life in an adventurous way. This helped her to deal with the ultimate horror, the chaos, as well as the beauty of life during the nation’s most unstable times. The author describes with comedy her life within a culture that is perceived by most of the Americans as hostile, but which she had to put up with right from the beginning (Kerr 102).

She was used to choosing her own relationships while in America and she dwelled in the freedom of choice. In contrast, the culture here was so mean that her life specifically rotated around the family and not the entire community as in America. The differences make the story extremely moving especially when she talks of the reverse culture.  Living among Arabs in this part of the Middle East seemed simple but also hard to some extent. The appropriate manner in which to relate with each other differs in the two big worlds.

From the author’s descriptions, it is clear that there are wide gaps between the rich and the poor, where the rich exploit the underprivileged. The Islamic way of life is also different compared to life in America where there are different religions mixed up with Christianity being a dominant one.  However, a few similarities can be spotted out from the book, showing that both have at least had chaos in the daily lives especially considering that they have ever involved themselves in wars either in one way or another Ann gives a narration of the terrorism she witnessed during the inter-Arab conflict.

Kerr was killed in front of his office while at the American University of Beirut by Hezbollah gunmen who had been ordered by Iran. The murder symbolized the very best of the nation sunk in misguided policy (Kerr 17). Many will remember this day when Lebanon had been haunted by millions of senseless murders over the past decades, but the murder of Kerr hit home for most Americans who had been associated with him and knew he was a scholar to be respected. In the same way, the terrorism that went on in America on the eleventh day of September was so emotional that Americans would not wish to experience such a terrorism attack again.

  The whole nation was stunned when four aeroplanes were hijacked by Al-Qaeda rebels and crashed them