Grounded firmly in both theory and archival research, this book brings a particularly unique and textured focus toward the home and its role in molding the modern middle class in late Ottoman Beirut. In A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut, Toufoul Abou-Hodeib sets out to write a “cultural history of domesticity that is at once global in the widest sense of the term and local enough to enter the most private of spaces” (2). Indeed, Abou-Hodeib defines domesticity as “a constellation of ideas and lifestyles in which the home played a crucial part both as a concept and as an actual material object” (4). What makes this book so appealing is the rich, multi-layered detail of her narrative, peppered with vignettes of everyday life, descriptions of municipal building code implementations, testimonies of divorce proceedings in court, and the spatial configuration of home and the things within it. Drawing on sources in English, Arabic, French, and Ottoman Turkish, Abou-Hodeib investigates twenty-six archival and government sources, news and journal articles, court records (particularly Hanafi court records), and the archives of the Beirut Municipal Council, which, until recently, were considered destroyed during the Lebanese Civil War.

The book comprises six chapters, thirty-nine pages of footnotes, thirty-nine pages of bibliography, a dozen illustrations, and three maps. Abou Hodeib builds her narrative from the outside in, starting with the imperial, regional, and urban contexts, then city streets and souks before settling on the home as a place linking the public and the private, global and local, modern and authentic. In Chapter One she focuses on Beirut and its urban expansion. Between the 1840s and 1860s, intramural Beirut burst beyond the confines of its old city walls, which measured a mere “rectangle of 350 by 550 meters,” to become the fastest growing port city on the eastern Mediterranean coast and, by 1888, the capital of its eponymous Ottoman province (21). From the outset, Abou-Hodeib questions oft-made assumptions about Beirut: that it was an increasingly westernized city, defined by its consumption of European-imported goods; that it was the rise of its intellectual and merchant classes that determined its history as an emerging capital city; and that it was a place rife with sectarian tension. Instead, she uncovers the rich multi-confessional character of a city peopled by a professional middle class of teachers, workers, and government officials who comingled and patronized local “artisanal and mechanized production” (46), without denying the existence of sectarian differences. In Chapter Two, Abou-Hodeib draws on the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, and postcolonial theory to tackle the concept of taste as it related to Beirut's urbane middle class. Using their domestic setting as a staging ground, Abou-Hodeib shows how this rising class used taste to express a collective identity encapsulating what it meant to be middle class and modern. Chapter Three gives us a street-level perspective of the home in relation to its rapidly urbanizing context. Through the enforcement of Ottoman legal promulgations, Beirut's municipal council brought the public into the private via the concept of public benefit. Such regulations ensured the home's compliance with urban beautification projects and public hygiene standards, and strengthened property values, issues still contested in present-day Beirut. In Chapters Four and Five, Abou-Hodeib takes us into the home to consider, for example, how Beirut households' access to a direct water supply, provided by British Beirut Waterworks, called forth new standards of domestic hygiene. Similarly, the central hall floor plan, characterizing the new homes built in Beirut's suburbs, featured “healthier” living spaces with air circulation, ventilation, and ample windows along a north-south axis to offer views of the sea and a cool Mediterranean breeze. Further yet, we learn how domestic things functioned as representations of the ethics, attitudes, and behavior of the modern middle class as epitomized by the educated woman (in her multiple roles as wife, mother, educator, intellectual, and house manager) who orchestrated the world within while simultaneously using it as a platform to reach public audiences. We also learn why Austrian bentwood chairs, English iron bedsteads, and phonographs inhabit so many Beirut homes, although the piano, at least among Beirut's local Protestant community, is conspicuous in its absence. In Chapter Six, attention turns to local entrepreneurialism and its reproduction of foreign, or ifrangi, imports for local consumption and how it gave the middle-class greater purchasing power and choices of how to materially represent “authentic modernity” (2107, 144). In short, Abou-Hodeib brings the domestic and its objects to life to tell the story of how Beirut's middle class identified themselves as modern (yet oriental) citizens and students of the nahda (cultural renaissance), whose discerning taste, displayed within their homes, set them apart from the opulence of the upper classes as much as it did from western influences.

Though the book could benefit from more images and maps, especially in the discussion of the expansion of Beirut's souks and khans in the late nineteenth century, this book makes a valuable contribution to the field of Middle East studies and would be of interest to students and scholars of material culture, social history, cultural history, and urban history as well as to those interested in the globalization of cities.