Lebanon Adrift – A book by Samir Khalaf

Something strange often happens to first year medical students, confronted by textbooks listing reams of sinister symptoms: they all come down with galloping hypochondria, seeing brain tumors in every headache and consumption in every cough. Something similar might happen to a Beiruti reading “Lebanon Adrift” — though instead of physical ailments, readers will look up from the pages and see, in every poster, traffic jam or flutter of false eyelashes, a society in torment. “Lebanon Adrift” is a wide-ranging diagnosis of Lebanon’s contemporary pathology as a culture of unrestrained excess, narcissism and escapism, indicative of political, moral and social alienation. Author Samir Khalaf is a distinguished sociologist and professor at the American University of Beirut. “Lebanon Adrift” is a book full of “personal indignation and outrage” — the sum of a lifetime of observation of a land he loves, in which he attempts to theorize those grating features of Lebanon’s