Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 106, Issue 4

"Speaking in Tongues is a very honest autobiography of a celebrated scholar. Fedwa Malti-Douglas chronicles her life and her struggles from her birth to the present day. Fedwa carries us on a journey that crosses landscapes of sadness, of happiness, of pain and peace, of alienation and acceptance, toward a healing enlargement of the soul. The book is a deeply moving account of her painful but heroic journey from a Christian childhood in a Lebanese village (where her father was a physician and her mother had deserted the family), to teen-age life in Ithaca, New York, where her Cornell professor uncle regularly beat both her and her brother, to a brilliant university career in Middle Eastern Studies, made difficult by the onset of an hereditary muscular dystrophy that Fedwa Malti and her historian husband Alan Douglas have battled with extraordinary bravery. The narrative shows that through all of her hardships, Fedwa retained her sense of humor and optimism, and her love of nature and art"--Publisher description.