An Egyptian adventure illuminated by Ward’s bubbly, curious personality.
The warm spirit of Egypt changes a woman’s life in this autobiographical adventure.
Randi Ward, a retired language arts teacher from Atlanta, Ga., never imagined she would come to see Egypt as a second home. However, during a vacation with her husband, she finds herself drawn to the culture and people of Cairo, and she stays in touch with some of her new friends on Facebook after returning to the U.S. She gets an unexpected offer from one—a three-month stint teaching English at a school in Cairo. Ward considers the idea for weeks; finally, despite speaking no Arabic, she decides to take a chance. Her life in Egypt is often frustrating: Her apartment is small and dingy, her Arabic never becomes strong enough for her to be fully independent, and her teaching schedule is taxing. Occasionally, life becomes frightening, as a wave of revolutionary protests sweeps through her neighborhood, forcing her to stay inside to avoid marches and tear gas. Ward makes it clear, however, that the warmth of her new life in Egypt far outweighs any challenges. Her students, who quickly become friends, invite her into their homes for family dinners and into their mosques for Friday prayers. Throughout the book, the author’s openness and curiosity about Egyptian food, customs, religious practices and history color all of her stories, although the nuts and bolts of teaching English as a second language could have been emphasized more. While the author praises her students’ intelligence and hard work, readers may want a bit more detail about her methods as well as the students’ progress over three months. However, moments like the anniversary of the 2011 Egyptian revolution more than make up for the lack of classroom scenes. Ms. Ward stands on the roof of the school with her students as a procession files through the streets below, carrying an immense Egyptian flag. Later, she and a student work their way through the throngs of people to join in the singing in Tahrir Square, which highlights the book’s main theme of how welcoming and inclusive Ward’s friends and students were to her, an outsider.
An Egyptian adventure illuminated by Ward’s bubbly, curious personality.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477289167
Page Count: 186
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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