In her pivotal work on Kuwaiti politics, Mary Ann Tétreault provides an“insider's guide” to the private and public spaces in which struggles overcommunal power are pursued by the government, the Parliament, and the people of Kuwait.Tétreault is careful to call her text “Stories of Democracy,” as she realizesthe reflexive nature of what democracy means at different periods in history (before oil, after oil,under Iraqi occupation, in post-Liberation Kuwait); for different people in Kuwait (women, themerchants, government officials, tribal leaders, service politicians, opposition leaders); and indifferent contexts (the mosque, the diwaniyya or men's social club, the civicassociation, Parliament, the government). With this in mind, she argues that“democracy” is a “concept that ‘moves' depending onone's assumptions” (p. 3). Her basic message is that Kuwaiti politics resembles thepolitics of the Greek city-state, and she relies on various forms of Aristotelian comparison toexplore this concept. Moreover, Tétreault illustrates that much of Kuwaiti politicsresembles a high-stakes soap opera. For example, she calls the bad debt crisis “one of thelongest running soap operas in Kuwaiti politics” (p. 164). In Chapter 4, she labels Kuwaitipolitics “a family romance, whose grip on political actors constrains their choices”(p. 67). Toward the end of her text in chapter 8, Tétreault combines these metaphorswhen she observes that in the city-state that is Kuwait, politics are “the product of adomestic public life that seems all too often like life in a large and contentious family” (p.206).