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, which precedes the Iraq war, 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.