Alia Malek, Author of "The Home That Was Our Country"
A Memoir of Syria
Journalist and author Alia Malek's memoir "The Home That Was Our Country" is "a brilliant combination of geopolitics and family history... eloquently exploring grief, resilience, and loss." (Publisher's Weekly)
About the Book
At the Arab Spring's hopeful start, Alia Malek returned to Damascus to reclaim her grandmother’s apartment, which had been lost to her family since Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970. Its loss was central to her parents’ decision to make their lives in America. In chronicling the people who lived in the Tahaan building, past and present, Alia portrays the Syrians—the Muslims, Christians, Jews, Armenians, and Kurds—who worked, loved, and suffered in close quarters, mirroring the political shifts in their country.
Teeming with insights, the narrative weaves acute political analysis with a century of intimate family history, ultimately delivering an unforgettable portrait of the Syria that is being erased.
About the Author
Alia Malek is a journalist and former civil rights lawyer. She is the author of A Country Called Amreeka: US History Re-Told Through Arab American Lives (Simon & Schuster 2009) and editor of Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post 9/11 Injustices (McSweeney's 2011). Her reportage has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the New Yorker, the Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, Jadaliyya, McSweeney’s, Guernica and other publications. In 2016, she was honored with the 12th annual Hiett Prize in the Humanities, and the New York Foundation for the Arts named her a fellow in Nonfiction Literature in the summer of 2017.
RSVP for an event reminder; attendance is on a first-come, first served basis.
- Date:
- Monday, June 11, 2018
- Time:
- 7:00pm - 8:30pm
- Location:
- Barbara M. Donnellan Auditorium
- Library:
- Central Library
- Categories:
- Author Talk Registration
- Calendar:
- zz Central