While Bebawi’s bluntness offers a honest picture of a man, the book’s lack of tact makes his arguments hard to swallow.
Bebawi shares his journey from his native Egypt to his adopted home, America, comparing and contrasting the two.
Earlier this year, a new generation of Egyptians confronted their country’s strained, perhaps irreconcilable mix of culture, religion and government. In his new memoir, Bebawi, born in Egypt in 1956, recounts his personal conflicts from a similarly tumultuous time in the country’s history, before he left his homeland in search of a romanticized dream of freedom and enlightenment in Europe and, finally in 1982, America. Despite a privileged upbringing as the child of an eminent judge, Bebawi recalls his formative years as the source of his pervasive disenchantment, underscored by disarming bluntness—“Having been sexually abused, I was never to be well adjusted,” he says of a situation that may also ring true for the alarming number of Egyptian victims he describes. Witnessed depravity and corruption in religion and government lead to similar disillusionment—he’s now an avowed atheist, socialist and cynic, all of which he brings to America. Once there, his cynicism hardens into grumpiness, becoming broader and shallower. For a man who has dedicated much of his life to academia—advanced degrees in Egypt and at Oxford, a teaching position at California State University, Fullerton—Bebawi’s takedowns lack nuance. “Republicans”—the loosely defined American enemy that bears the brunt of Bebawi’s puerile rage—are “mentally challenged.” Also, his logic and persuasive power stutter with a loose grasp of rhetorical craft. Still, buried under the bitterness, genuine insight surfaces. “[E]ducation is a matter of necessity if we [are] to compete in this climate of Globalization,” Bebawi says, while also presenting reasoned arguments against capital punishment and for general social responsibility. But his indignation too often mines a bizarre assortment of complaints in America—corporations, airport security, credit cards, parking—that supposedly parallels, or unrealistically outweighs, the abject inhumanity Bebawi faced in Egypt, the kind that is still causing revolutions there. Bebawi turns with a sanctimonious bent usually featured in letters to the Department of Consumer Affairs or congressmen, several of which are photocopied and included.
While Bebawi’s bluntness offers a honest picture of a man, the book’s lack of tact makes his arguments hard to swallow.Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461107736
Page Count: 175
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2011
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
