An affectionate examination of an enthralling world on the banks of the Nile River.
An author recounts his time among Egyptian farmers in this debut anthropological memoir.
Dissatisfied with the way his graduate classes on the Middle East ignored the everyday experiences of the region’s poor, Adams spent 20 months living in a remote village in Egypt to observe and gather research for his doctoral thesis. “My professors at Berkeley may well have thrown up their hands at my desire to become a latter-day T. E. Lawrence,” he writes, nearly 40 years later. “But I was determined. I was also more than a little naive.” This is not a book of scholarship, however: here Adams sets out to describe the lives of the Egyptian fellahin (the “tillers of the soil”) in a way that captures their rugged humanity, both as modern individuals and as practitioners of a way of life that stretches back 3,500 years. Adams gained access to the Upper Egyptian village of El-Diblah, where he quickly became embroiled in the local customs and rhythms, politics and feuds, of life in the narrow habitable zone on the banks of the Nile River. Adams’ narrative presents him as the perfect fish out of water: unsure, prudish, polite to a fault, and out of his depth in the thick local dialect of Arabic. Yet he perseveres, winning the admiration of the reader as he communicates his own appreciation for the fellahin. His self-deprecating, highly descriptive prose summons their world like a mirage out of the desert, evoking in the reader simultaneous feelings of wanderlust and gratitude for postindustrial standards of living. The most remarkable aspect of the book is the reader’s distance from it all: Adams was in El-Diblah in 1978 and yet, as one footnote acknowledges, the subsequent rise of Islamic fundamentalism has made such a project essentially impossible in 2015. An epilogue describes Adams’ brief return to El-Diblah six years later, offering some finality on a few of the dramatis personae. Even so, one wonders how much has changed for the fellahin in the intervening decades and whether such transformation represents progress or a loss of identity.
An affectionate examination of an enthralling world on the banks of the Nile River.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-48169-1
Page Count: 252
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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