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 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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