The Arab Americans: A History

This powerful, personal account of more than 100 years of the history of Arab Americans combines the research of a historian with the vivid storytelling of a poet and novelist. Greg Orfalea's search for insight into his family's past took him on a ten-year odyssey from Los Angeles to his family's ancestral village in Syria to nearly thirty Arab-American communities across the United States. His archival research includes interviews with more than a hundred Arab Americans?from taxi drivers and shopkeepers to White House correspondent Helen Thomas. Arab Americans is a moving depiction of life on the inside of a community that has found itself increasingly in the spotlight, but none the better understood for it.