This is a street level view of Syria from 1965 that is far more nuanced than most reports in the US media. Tarif Bakdash, MD, was born and raised in Syria. He went to school with Bashar al-Assad, worked with Bashars wife Asma, butted heads with Baath Party bureaucrats, lost friends to anti-Islamic purges. Tarif tells his story: a nurturing childhood in a warm family -- against fear of war, the maiming of his mother, jailing of a schoolmate for no reason, the blood-soaked ground of Hama in 1982, omnipresent security services, Soviet-style thinking, old-fashioned graft, and official doubletalk. Tarif Bakdash shows us history from the inside -- in the life of a child, a student -- a young man struggling to create a life for himself. And then he shows it to us again, in the eyes of a middle-aged MD who, after many years in the US, returns to the city of his birth as an impatient American intent on reforming the Syrian system from within.