In this charming book, the late Charles Issawi, a prolific scholar whose work on the economic history of the Middle East helped at least two generations of scholars and students better understand the origins of the modern Middle East, discusses his life and scholarship. In the first half of the book, Issawi reminisces about his childhood and youth in the form of two essays that include many interesting anecdotes about life in the Middle East in an earlier age. He was born in 1916 in Cairo to Syrian parents. He spent his childhood in Cairo, Khartoum, and Lebanon and attended school in Alexandria. As he states in the book, Issawi considered himself culturally Lebanese and Egyptian. In the fall of 1934, he began to attend Magdalen College at Oxford, where he met Albert Hourani for the first time, beginning a friendship that was to last for more than fifty years. Actually, they had both attended a History Scholarship examination earlier that year and had taken two of the three history scholarships offered by the college, “leaving the third for the whole British Empire.” After receiving his bachelor's degree, Issawi returned to Cairo to begin working for the National Bank of Egypt. By 1942, he had grown restless working for a bank in the midst of the war and began writing a book on the Egyptian economy. This first book was published in 1947 and soon was banned in Egypt because of its criticism of the government, Issawi relates. He began teaching at the American University in Beirut, then moved to Washington, D.C., to work in the Arab Office there. In 1951, he began teaching in the Economics Department at Columbia University.