LibGuides: Arab American Heritage Month: Books

Books

Nonfiction
Fiction

Arab-American Faces and Voices
ISBN: 0292709196
In this book, Elizabeth Boosahda, a third-generation Arab American, draws on over two hundred personal interviews, as well as photographs and historical documents that are contemporaneous with the first generation of Arab Americans (Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians), both Christians and Muslims, who immigrated to the Americas between 1880 and 1915, and their descendants. Using the voices of Arab immigrants and their families, she explores their entire experience, from emigration at the turn of the twentieth century to the present-day lives of their descendants.
The Arab Americans
ISBN: 1566565979
Gregory Orfalea's new and definitive work spans a century and a half of the life of Arab immigrants and their descendants in the United States. In The Arab Americans: A History, Orfalea has marshaled over 150 interviews and 25 years of research to tell the story that begins in 1856, when camel driver Hajdi Ali (or Hi Jolly) was hired by Jefferson Davis to cut a "camel trail" across the Southwest, and continues through the 2005 arrest of a former Virginia high school valedictorian accused of plotting with al-Qaeda. It is the history of a community uniquely repressed in American scholarship, history, literature, and politics.
Arab American Voices
ISBN: 0787629561
This text allows students and researchers to study 20 speeches, poems, newspaper accounts and other materials about Arab Americans.
Arab Detroit
ISBN: 0814328113
Metropolitan Detroit is home to one of the largest, most diverse Arab communities outside the Middle East, yet the complex world Arabic-speaking immigrants have created there is barely visible on the landscape of ethnic America. In this volume, Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock bring together the work of twenty-five contributors to create a richly detailed portrait of Arab Detroit. In their efforts to represent an ethnic/immigrant community that is flourishing on the margins of pluralist discourse, the contributors to this book break new ground in the study of identity politics, transnationalism, and diaspora cultures.
Arab Folklore
ISBN: 9780313333118
The Arab world is constantly in the news. This book gives students and general readers an introduction to Arab culture by surveying the folklore of the region. Central to any society are the beliefs and customs held dear by the people. In examining Arab folklore, this book provides a fundamental understanding of the ways of the Arab world. In doing so, it helps readers appreciate Arab culture and gain insight into one of the world's most politically and economically important regions.
Arab World and Arab-Americans
ISBN: 9789992570470
Bint Arab
ISBN: 0275956717
Shakir tells the long neglected story of the bint arab--the Arab woman--in the United States. Drawing on primary sources such as club minutes, census records, and dozens of interviews, she explores the experience of late 19th- and early 20th-century immigrants--mostly Christian peasants from Lebanon and Syria--and their American-born daughters. Later, she moves on to the well-assimilated granddaughters (many of whom have reidentified with the Arab community and begun to fight its political battles). The work concludes with those women--most of them Muslim--who have emigrated over the last quarter century from many Arab countries, particularly Palestinians.
Crossing the Waters
ISBN: 9780874745481
Collection of essays and case studies addressing early 20th-century Arabic-speaking communities in cities throughout the United States.
How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
ISBN: 9780143115410
An eye-opening look at how young Arab- and Muslim-Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy. Bayoumi takes readers into the lives of seven twenty-somethings living in Brooklyn, home to the largest Arab-American population in the United States. He moves beyond stereotypes and clichés to reveal their often unseen struggles, from being subjected to government surveillance to the indignities of workplace discrimination. Through it all, these young men and women persevere through triumphs and setbacks as they help weave the tapestry of a new society that is, at its heart, purely American.
Life in the Terror Decade
ISBN: 9780814335000
In Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade, a follow-up to their volume Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream (Wayne State University Press, 2000), editors Nabeel Abraham, Sally Howell, and Andrew Shryock present accounts of how life in post-9/11 Detroit has changed over the last ten years. As they explore the complex demands of life in the Terror Decade, the contributors to this volume create vivid portraits of a community that has fought back successfully against attempts to deny its national identity and diminish its civil rights.
Old Islam in Detroit
ISBN: 9780199372003
Old Islam in Detroit documents the rich history of Islam in Detroit, a city that is home to several of America's oldest and most diverse Muslim communities. The book documents the culture wars and doctrinal debates that ensued as these populations confronted Muslim newcomers who did not understand their manner of worship or the American identities they had created. By looking closely at this historical encounter, Sally Howell provides a new interpretation of the possibilities and limits of Muslim incorporation in American life.
Scheherazade's Legacy
ISBN: 0275981762
In a time when it seems that the gap of understanding between the West and the Middle East continues to widen, Scheherazade's Legacy builds a bridge between the two cultures. Collected here are the voices of those who define the genre of Arab Anglophone writing--that literature that describes the cultural experiences of those with Arab identities living, and often writing, in the West. The essays consider aspects of identity, family, politics, memory, and other crucial cultural issues that impact them personally and professionally as writers. In creative and thoughtful prose, these important women writers shed new light on what it means to be a writer in a world not fully your own.
This Is What America Looks Like
ISBN: 9780062954213
An intimate and rousing memoir by progressive trailblazer Ilhan Omar--the first African refugee, the first Somali-American, and one of the first Muslim women, elected to Congress. This is What America Looks Like is both the inspiring coming of age story of a refugee and a multidimensional tale of the hopes and aspirations, disappointments and failures, successes, sacrifices and surprises, of a devoted public servant with unshakable faith in the promise of America.

The Kite Runner
ISBN: 1594480001
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons - their love, their sacrifices, their lies. A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful novel that has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
ISBN: 9781594489501
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.
The Yacoubian Building
ISBN: 0060878134
August Book Sense Pick A fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed 'scientist of women.' A purring, voluptuous siren. A young shop-girl enduring the clammy touch of her boss and hating herself for accepting the modest banknotes he tucks into her pocket afterward. An earnest, devout young doorman, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism. A cynical, secretly gay newspaper editor, helplessly in love with a peasant security guard. A roof-squatting tailor, scheming to own property. A corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify taking a mistress. All live in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor slowly decaying in the smog and hubbub of downtown Cairo, Egypt. In the course of this unforgettable novel, these disparate lives converge, careening inexorably toward an explosive conclusion.