Contrived contradictions between Lebanon's checkered past and its pulsating present inform Samir Khalaf's Lebanon Adrift. Initial wonderment as to how Lebanon acts as a “playground,” and continues to function given its entrenched political and social sectarian rivalries, develops into Khalaf's personal moral rebuke. He laments Lebanon's failure to set itself upon a corrective path that would resolve sectarian animosities and avoid its spiraling into kitsch and spectacle. Accordingly, Lebanon Adrift also reads as a monument of mourning: the author's diagnosis of Lebanon's moral disjuncture demonstrates his grief at its current transformation. And yet, the ailments Khalaf derides are ones that he actually fashions through his selective collection of examples and ethical judgment.

For Khalaf, Lebanon is in an unsettled state. This affliction is a consequence of the fifteen-year civil war (1975–90), and especially Lebanon's inability to overcome the (re)tribalization that is the war's remnant. This has allowed for the country to drift without objective. Even worse, Lebanon seems to have no recourse. The notion that Lebanon is “adrift” threads Khalaf's six chapters together and unfortunately prevents the reader from considering alternative power structures or actors who could alter the country's seemingly aimless trajectory.

Khalaf evidences Lebanon's lack of direction by chronicling its uneven reconstruction efforts after the war. This simultaneously mires Lebanon in a conflicted state. And yet, even if it is destined to reformulate an “age-old” communal conflict, as Khalaf claims, Lebanon is not stagnant. Even he concedes that Lebanon refashions conflict in novel and original ways (p. 38). This challenges Khalaf's own description of a Lebanon trapped. Lebanon's reformulations of identity are not fixed, but are inventive and active—even Khalaf concedes this. “Today … the overt expression of communal and sectarian identities has become much more assertive” (p. 43). He then voices his alarm at the pervasiveness of the overt expression of communal identities. “Even competitive sports, normally the most transcending and neutral human encounter, have been factionalized” (p. 43). Khalaf misses the opportunity to connect the politicization of identity and its ever-inventive manifestations in Lebanon to increasingly racialized and territorialized sites worldwide. Why would Lebanon be any different? Sporting events are neither neutral nor transcendent in quality. In European club football, for example, Amsterdam's Ajax and Rotterdam's Feyenoord exchange anti-Semitic slurs and signs so comfortably that commentators do not even wince when thousands of Feyenoord fans make hissing noises directed towards Ajax fans to resemble Hitler's gas chambers.

The exclusivity of Lebanon, upheld by Khalaf, reinforces his own characterization of Lebanon as being “adrift.” His detailing of failed reconstruction efforts in Lebanon does not consider different geographic locations with shared histories. Parts of the former Yugoslavia, Angola, and South Africa also experience wealth discrepancies juxtaposed with an elite upper class thriving on the newest gadgets and markers of success. Are they also adrift? Is the compulsion to buy, which Khalaf claims “has become almost [a] national pastime, an outlet for traumatized individuals in their futile attempt to restore their damaged self-regard and personal worth” (p. 140), truly special to Lebanon?

And even when Khalaf recognizes the inspiring actions of Lebanese who could “direct” Lebanon, such as the Green Party, the Lebanese Transparency Association (LTA), and the Youth Association for Social Awareness (YASA), he subsequently contests the efficacy of his own claims. He laments how those in the creative industries, including architects and civic-minded graphic designers, are exporting their skill (p. 256). He similarly challenges his own praise of the gay rights voluntary association Helem, when he lists its accomplishments and then immediately declares that “evidence extracted from a score of recent studies reveals that most Lebanese are still averse to considering a gay way of life as acceptable” (p. 190). While it would be difficult to dispute such an assertion, this should not efface the powerful and public protests Helem continues to organize. In addition, Khalaf does not mention the many Helem volunteers, who, along with others, have gone on to establish their own nongovernmental organizations and organizations dedicated to confronting gender oppression in Lebanon. These include Sawt al-Niswa, a network and community of feminist writers, activists, and artists; and Nasawiya, a group of feminists engaged in challenging all forms of gender oppression in Lebanon and the Arab world.

Khalaf omits actors who potentially challenge Lebanon's adrift condition. Additionally, he does not take the opportunity to identify those groups responsible for encouraging its aimlessness. For example, while he quotes extensively the advertising panels on mass construction residence sites, labeling them exuberant and delusional (pp. 173–75), he does not engage with class issues inherently connected to both the advertisements and the building construction. All of the “vignettes” are written in English, raising an issue of access. Who do these vignettes target? It is not merely that people may buy into the fallacy of advertisements, as Khalaf cautions, but rather, who has the ability to do so. His inattention to the target consumer of these advertisements is a missed opportunity to engage with regional and global income inequality, the effects of neoliberal economic policies employed by Lebanon's government, and the foreign migrant laborer who make up the bulk of its construction workers.

Perhaps Khalaf does not directly explore income inequality because he identifies the upper class as the group that can direct Lebanon and end its aimlessness. His admiration for the Saifi neighborhood, described as “one of the most animated and vibrant artistic and cultural quarters in Beirut and perhaps elsewhere in the region” exposes his high regard for exclusivity (p. 202). His veneration of the space, he explains, is due to three reasons: the “relentless” flow of culturally oriented and artistic ventures, the “female monopoly” of these activities, and the exclusive, soothing, and aesthetically pleasing public area of the neighborhood, given the area's proximity to the “boisterous dimensions of public protest” in the Bourj (p. 202). While the problems with Khalaf's reasoning are too numerous to mention here, one can pause at the assumption of access. The “disproportionate number of security guards with ear phones and walkie talkies” are justified as Solidere's attentive concern for the “the safety and exclusive character of the village” (p. 202). And who can afford the organic farm foods of Souk el-Tayeb that he labels a welcome “plebianization” into the neighborhood (p. 203)? One also notes the moral scolding of those who engage in public political activities that apparently cause this need for a secure and quiet space.

What is particularly alarming is how the writer measures either the lack, or achievement, of culture vis-à-vis the actions of women. Khalaf identifies the transformation of the Saifi neighborhood as a historical irony. Women, who used to prostitute their bodies and therefore “shaped” the neighborhood's “debased character,” are now its “undisputed cultural brokers” and its “ultimate salvation by acting as carriers of moral uplift, socio-economic emancipation and aesthetic and cultural enlightenment” (p. 202). Women are transformed into sites that mark a level of gestation of cultural sophistication and the success of private enterprise. Their activities, limited to prostitutes or monopolists, and the small, expensive, and guarded space of the neighborhood, demonstrates the “successful artistic reinforcement in the rehabilitation of Beirut's national character” (p. 204).

And yet it is not merely that the rehabilitation of Beirut's national character is potentially achieved by exclusivity guaranteed by security officials employed by a construction agency, or that women, once again, become markers for cultural standing and the status of the health of the nation-state. The indicators of an apparently needed rehabilitation are shown to have occurred in Beirut and then assumed to have spread and affected the rest of country. However, it is important to note that Khalaf's discussion centers on the activities in Beirut. These activities in turn are transformed into measures that mark Lebanon's adrift status. While I am not advocating that there is a “real” Lebanon that Khalaf ignores by referring almost exclusively to Beirut, I do question the apparent disseminating quality found in the “excessive commodification,” the state of being “adrift,” and other characteristics Khalaf identifies in Beirut. Do these naturally export themselves even to the rest of Lebanon?