The Falcon Diaries

An American in Jordan

An American writer joins her husband, a contractor/consultant working in Iraq, to live in Amman, Jordan, and keeps a diary of day-to-day events. Out of this emerge so many stories of the pain and frustration of a forgotten world dating from a half-century earlier—the Palestinians who fled Israel in the ’48 and ’67 wars. In both cases — whether the Iraqi war or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — she finds herself squarely within the enemy camp and seeks to find out why that is, delving into the history and layering it within the quotidian. In so doing, she discovers that, for these Arabs, fairness rules in the face of injustice and inclusiveness is much preferred to jihad. In the end, her quest leads her to Israeli Ambassador, Jacob Rosen, who clings to the status quo and Prince Hassan, the uncle of the reigning monarch — who symbolizes, for her, the falcon — a man whose goal is a regional solution.