Stephen William Foster has taught anthropology at Smith College and the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Past is Another Country. He is an independent scholar and a nursing administrator at San Francisco General Hospital.

• 1 Theater2 Poetics of Place3 Cafe Table4 Symbolic Wounds5 Possible Cosmopolitans6 The Predicament of Difference

This book is wonderful, and anyone interested in the shock of modernity in the Arab world should read it. Foster's haunting explorations of the hearts and minds of his Moroccan friends is both a portrait of a country and a loving collaboration in its negotiations with a changing world. He combines a storyteller's gift, an anthropologist's intellectual rigor, and a compassionate fascination with desire, confusion, and despair that has only deepened in the course of a remarkable second career in psychiatric nursing.