Near Grand Central Station I sat and cried.

We are facing a historic journey from World War I to the later stages of the country's life, with a multitude of high politics in the background, made by Ottoman and British imperialists, Turanists and Arab nationalists, Sunnis and Shia, Baathists and Communists, Christians and Kurds. The history of a state established by Faisal, Churchill, Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, and others who decided to grant it self-rule or a less costly mandate than annexation to the empire. The most events narrated by Tamara Al-Jalabi in this book are from the perspective of Baby, her grandmother, the wife of Abdul Hadi Al-Jalabi, a woman who was progressive for her time, smoking and interested in politics, intervening in social life, a mischievous woman who resented the constraints of femininity in a traditional society, and Tamara wrote her biography with high eloquence, accompanied by melodramatic prose and a rich panorama of Iraqi local life as the nation develops toward a hopeful and modern future.