Boy from Tower of Moon

Bustling, ""obscenely poor,"" disease-ridden, Magdaluna (""Tower of the Moon"") is a Lebanese village where everybody is related to everybody else by blood or marriage. The town's petty scandals, bitter feuds, oral traditions and colorful characters provide grist for Accawi's bittersweet memoir, a series of essays told with sprightly humor and imbued with the ironic wisdom of a mature man looking back on youthful na vet . By age five, the precocious narrator realizes that grownups are fickle, cruel, often amoral. The narrative is loosely structured around ""learning moments,"" or ""steps"" on the metaphorical ""pyramid"" of personal identity that Accawi erects skyward: the death of a beloved raccoon, the village's very first radio in 1947, his discovery of the written word and so forth. The strongest piece deals with his deeply religious, Presbyterian, no-nonsense grandmother, whose faith was sorely tested by the cancer that left her paralyzed from the waist down. While Accawi's father is a distant figure, his tough Syrian mother, illiterate but wise, steels him to face life's challenges. The wide-eyed narrator nostalgically evokes visits to the village by itinerant Gypsies, a Turkish bear trainer, a Moroccan medicine man. But emigration and the advent of cars and telephones fueled the village's slow, agonizing death and, after the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, Muslim soldiers razed the hamlet. Throughout, Accawi, who now teaches at the English Language Insitute in Knoxville, Tenn., spins lyrical, magical stories, vividly charting a boy's awakening to the mysteries of death, life, grief, sex and God. (May) FYI: A portion of this book appeared in Best American Essays 1998.