An intensive firsthand exploration of modern Egyptian liberation and solidarity.
Impassioned coverage from the front lines of a historic Middle Eastern uprising.
New Yorker staff writer Steavenson (The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny, 2009) reported from Cairo during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution amid President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, and she diligently charts her thoughts and experiences in this series of biographical sketches and observances. Arriving in Cairo a day after Egypt’s Day of Rage, the author became immediately immersed in the highly volatile landscape as friendly yet scrutinizing armed citizen committees patrolled Tahrir Square while tanks and militia in riot gear ascended the Corniche El-Nile. Steavenson came to appreciate and become enthralled by this prideful population eager to commit their newfound freedom to video and social media. Traversing an “awkward mix of military with civilians,” she encountered an emboldened Egyptian counterculture, and she brings their stories to vibrant life. Among them were a prominent, politically active gynecologist upon whose panoramic balcony Steavenson met a colorful host of budding radicals; proprietors of a century-old, family-owned bakery; a young translator who accompanied the author to sprawling midnight sit-ins; a sensitive, street-wise taxi driver; and a cutthroat lieutenant colonel with Egyptian military intelligence. Collectively, their stories illustrate the rich Egyptian cultural tapestry of a triumphant people, even as a new president rose to power and violence erupted on Steavenson’s final day in Cairo. The author’s anecdotes and reflections are complemented by photographs of ubiquitous graffiti found throughout Tahrir Square, which formed an artistic voice of the people, creatively exemplifying their defiance and revolutionary fervor. Though her own personal narration bears weight to the experience, Steavenson allows the reformists she encountered to speak for themselves as they strived for social justice: “I would need to be a novelist,” she writes, “to write a better truth than these glimpses offer.”
An intensive firsthand exploration of modern Egyptian liberation and solidarity.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237525-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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