Friday was the bomb : Five years in the Middle East

In 2008, Nathan Deuel, a former editor at Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, and his wife, a National Public Radio foreign correspondent, moved to the deeply Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to see for themselves what was happening in the Middle East. There they had a daughter, and later, while his wife filed reports from Baghdad and Syria, car bombs erupted and one night a firefight raged outside the family's apartment in Beirut. Their marriage strained, and they struggled with the decision to stay or go home. At once a meditation on fatherhood, an unusual memoir of a war correspondent's spouse, and a first-hand account from the front lines of the most historic events of recent days-- the Arab Spring, the end of the Iraq war, and the unrest in Syria-- Friday Was the Bomb is a searing collection of timely and absorbing essays.