Insightful, Moving Study of the Iraqi Chalabi Dynasty

Tamara Chalabi's "Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of my Iraqi Family," has just been published by Harper's Press. "Late for Tea at the Deer Palace," is her literary-historical chronicle of the Chalabi family over the last century. Like "Wild Swans," which recounts three generations of women through the oppressive cycles of modern China, this book combines personal vignettes with the tumultuous march of history and the long years of exile and suffering for a family that was the richest landowner and trader in pre-Saddam Iraq, framed especially through the eyes of Tamara's grandmother Bibi Bassam (1900-1989).