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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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