A multigenerational memoir covering the 20th century in Iraq through the eyes of a single family. Chalabi does an excellent job of weaving personal anecdotes about the weddings and educations and minor tragedies of four generations of her family into the larger history of Iraq – as it passes from being a territory of the Ottoman empire, to a British mandate, to having its own king, to a military coup that declares itself a republic, to another military coup, to another military coup, to the rise of Saddam Hussein. As someone who is embarrassingly ignorant of modern Iraqi history, a lot of this book was completely new information to me, and Chalabi managed to make a huge number of names and political stances into a compelling, easily readable story.

I'd probably most recommend this book for that history lesson, but the individuals in her family that she chooses to focus on make for fascinating characters in themselves. There's the blind lawyer and his female note-taker, who fall in love; the shrewd businessman who chooses a charity over an investment and loses everything; the brilliant prodigy who dies of a brain tumor just before his potential turns into action.

While it's easy to feel sympathy with Chalabi's family's struggles and sense of exile (they've been banned from Iraq since the 1960s), they were an extrememly wealthy and politically powerful family, and Chalabi comes off as blind to their own privilege. Like, no, I don't actually feel very sorry that you no longer live in a *literal palace* while having lunch parties with the king. Chalabi's writing has frequent disregard for the agency and personal lives of their servants that made me uncomfortable. Still, I came away with a mostly positive view of the book, and would have given it 4 or 5 stars, except that it was only in reading other reviews that I realized her father is Ahmed Chalabi, aka "The Man Who Pushed America to War", aka the person most individually responsible for the lie that Hussein had WMDs in 2003. Would Chalabi – either Ahmed or Tamara – have a different take on that previous sentence? Probably! But I'll never know that side of the story, because Tamara literally doesn't bring up the topic at all. Which is the sort of... not quite *mis*information, but deliberate *lack* of information that definitely gets you a star knocked off.