This book is not the autobiography of a person, as its cover might suggest; rather, it is the autobiography of a society and the dominant culture of that society. The biography of Uncle Jaber (Aseel) represents the biography of the "tribe" in the Arabian Peninsula, specifically before and shortly after the emergence of the Saudi "state." The pressure of the tribe, as an existential component of the human being, and not merely an element of his identity, is what drove a nine-year-old boy to walk for 14 days from the east of the Arabian Peninsula to its center. During that journey, he was exposed to a maze of sand and scrub, wolves and hyenas. He did all this to affirm his belonging to the tribe, far from which he was born and raised among his maternal uncles' tribe. During a children's fight, one of them described him as a "foreigner." This was the word that prompted the boy to embark on a suicidal journey to restore his self-esteem! But this stubborn Bedouin, whom we expected to grow up to become a "tribal sheikh," surprised everyone around him—including the readers of this book—by transforming in mid-life from a "Bedouin" to a "villager." He kept a cow in his mud house after having been passionate about herding camels in the desert, and tended to the palm trees in his home's orchard after having tended to a tent and sheep. Has the "tribe" and its fanaticism ended in our society now? No, but it is no longer the only means, nor the most important means, of expressing identity and demonstrating pride. This novel/biography is full of social features of a man from the Arabian Peninsula who responded with his will, always strong, to the transformations of Arabian Peninsula society from being dependent on the tribe and Bedouinism to the space of the state and civilization, but with a solid insistence on maintaining fundamental "values" that are not subject to compromise! Ziad Al-Drees