Farewell, Babylon is the memoir of a Jewish Iraqi ex-pat, talking about his adolescence in 1940s Baghdad. I thought this was gonna be a really interesting book and it mostly ended up being superficial adolescent boy angst that was super boring and irritating. He barely touched on topics that I would have loved to see more fully developed (like the pro-German sentiments that some Iraqis felt because they were the enemies of Iraq's colonizers and how that put Jewish Iraqis in a difficult position because Nazis weren't exactly subtle with their antisemitism or how the creation of Israel affected the Jewish diaspora in the Middle East). Instead there was chapter upon chapter about him visiting prostitutes and obsessing over how much a mystery women were. It basically felt like every other self-important adolescent boy's "coming of age" story that has ever been written and just as boring as all the ones that came before. ( )