In “Late for Tea at the Deer Palace,” Tamara Chalabi writes a colorful family history, a story inextricably tied to the recent tumult in Iraq. She follows several generations of her family through domestic milestones like marriage, detailing the inevitable public life that came with being one of the prominent families of Baghdad in the turbulent period from the end of World War II until Saddam Hussein’s rise and fall.

Chalabi reveals a side of Iraq that is often overlooked amid today’s news reports about strife and radicalism, one populated by real people that easily capture the reader’s sympathies. Chief among these characters is Bibi, the author’s grandmother, who plays a prominent role throughout the story. She is a self-assured, vibrant woman who immediately hits it off with her father-in-law, the politician Abdul Hussein Chalabi, charming him with her unladylike interest in current events and the outside world. We see her eventually lay aside her abaya, the long black veil by which conservative Muslim women are often characterized, under the influence of a progressive movement that sweeps through Baghdad, and the Chalabi household with it.

Bibi is an excellent portrayal of a three-dimensional Iraqi woman, neither the terrified and oppressed Muslim wife nor the recklessly defiant runaway bride of conventional Western media; her unexpected defiance gives the reader rare insight into what is often seen as a monolithic, alien culture. Indeed, one of the best and most fascinating aspects of the book is its portrayal of the interaction between Western and Middle Eastern culture in Baghdad as the city, already diverse and populous by Middle Eastern standards, struggles to modernize. (This is perhaps best captured by Chalabi’s sensitive portrayal of the Iraqi Jewish community.)

Bibi, as a woman of means, the wife of a prominent family, is the perfect mouthpiece for such a conflict. Through her eyes, we see Iraq as it once was, a society with a rich cultural heritage, clinging to vestiges of its former grandeur. Hints of mosaic tiles and lush Persian carpets and a city bristling with minarets all recall the splendor of old Mesopotamia; throughout the book, there is a palpable longing for the glory days of yore.

The Chalabis were a wealthy and influential household; their estate was known as “Deer Palace” for the distinctive statue of a deer that graced its front lawn. There, they entertained a number of luminaries of the day, including King Faisal himself. Bibi saw much of her extended family, including several of her children, go into politics at a time of instability, flagrant abuse of power and cautious hope. While Iraqi politics and the chronology of historical events are, especially to a Western audience, less engaging and often difficult to follow, Chalabi handles them well, balancing the necessarily drier parts with humor and personal anecdotes.

The reader’s confusion, especially with regard to the morass of foreign names and histories, is to be expected in this sort of book. If anything, Chalabi would be guilty of oversimplification; perhaps in an effort to render the story more accessible (though one could go as far as to call her somewhat black-and-white politics self-indulgent – her sympathies are quite apparent), she writes the various factions in a more heavy-handed, polarized manner than is necessary.

It is apparent, regardless, that Chalabi, with her doctorate in history, is more an academic by trade than a storyteller. She writes with a manifest passion for the subject matter but still manages to deliver stretches of rather uninspiring prose. She has an irksome tendency, particularly at some of the critical, emotional moments in the tale, to tell rather than show, as if she were too cautious to tackle the subject matter head-on. After Bibi recovers from an illness, Chalabi says, rather tritely, “When she recovered, they appreciated just how precious she was to them, just as she realized how important her family and her homeland were to her.” Equally awkward are her attempts to splice her experiences of Iraq in the modern day with the stories of her grandparents in a pre-Saddam Baghdad; her transitions are invariably jarring. This is further exacerbated by the meandering, somewhat inconsistent pacing of her story, an affliction common to memoirs written by those unfamiliar with the form.

Tamara Chalabi is in the fortunate position of having a compelling tale to tell, with the linguistic competence and editorial acumen to tell it adequately, if not beautifully. The strengths of the book lie in the uniqueness and inherent appeal of the story more so than the way she presents it. It provides, nonetheless, a refreshing perspective on the circumstances leading up to today’s conflicted Iraq.