This is a personal account of an American woman and her family's unpredictable journey between the public and private worlds of Marrakech and of a struggle that finally led the author to be accepted by her female Moroccan neighbors.

Vast political and economic shifts have transformed the Middle East since the 1985 edition of this award-winning work: the end of the Cold War, the Iran-Iraq war, and the Lebanese civil war; the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War; and the historic 1993 peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians, to name just a few. Which is why Robert A. and Elizabeth Warnock Fernea felt a need to return to the towns and cities they had written about - in Iraq,...