A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman

Nostalgia is front and center in Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ atmospheric memoir of life in Beirut, a war-torn city once belonging to Syria and later, the capital of Lebanon. Born in 1909, Cortas died in 1979, but her impassioned account of a four-decade career as principal of the Ahliah School for Girls touches on themes that remained pertinent throughout the twentieth century—colonialism and the founding of Israel, among them. Cortas was fiercely committed to the education of girls and sought international examples to prod her students into imagining an array of possibilities for their lives.