The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, Written by Peter Hessler, Penguin Press, 2018 Press,

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Hessler at Abydos where you can clearly see the narrow Nile Valley and the abrupt change to desert.

Hessler at Abydos where you can clearly see the narrow Nile Valley and the abrupt change to desert.

Excavating at Abydos

Excavating at Abydos

Beautiful two daughters in from of the apartment entry.

Beautiful two daughters in from of the apartment entry.

Looking up the elevator shaft with the spider web iron work.

Looking up the elevator shaft with the spider web iron work.

Dive into this engrossing book of creative non-fiction about Egypt, mostly since the overthrow of Mubarak.  The focus is on the Arab Spring, beginning in 2010, through 2016.  Hessler, his Chinese wife and identical twin toddler daughters, arrived in Cairo in 2011.  On the strength of his three previous books about his experiences in China, he travels with an idea, but no contract for this book.  He had just received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship that enabled the venture.

In a unique way, the Hesslers immerses themselves into Egyptian culture.  He and his wife study Egyptian Arabic, the street colloquial spoken and written in Egypt.  It differs significantly from al-fusha, Classical Arabic, which is the bridging language among the 26 or 27 colloquial versions used through the Arab world.  They hire a unique tutor who uses words and situations from their immediate experiences to teach.  Thus, the weekly vocabulary he shares with us is a springboard for what is happening around Cairo.

Portraits of the people who live and work with the Hesslers, for them, and around them populate the book.  The garbage man and his family are front and center representatives of the role reserved for Coptic Christians and the illiterate lower classes.  An Egyptian reporter becomes a fast friend.  He is a homosexual in a country that still executes men and women who are caught in this “sin”.  The site manager at The Buried, the oldest of Egyptian ancient burial sites and located in Upper Egypt at Abydos, exemplifies how ingenuity wins over bureaucratic stupidity and rapacious looters.  Chinese retailers come to Egypt with nothing and succeed selling sexy lingerie in a country where most women are covered from head to toe in public. 

Hessler’s  picture of Egypt the country is not flattering.  Egyptians lack the basic skills of organization.  Their sense of time does not work with the Western world.  Theirs seems influenced by the eternal time of their history rather than impetus of the present.  Education is a muddle; better schools are taught in English, French, German—there are no significant schools based in the Egyptian language and culture. Yet, with Hessler, you will cheer for the small successes—which like everything else in Egypt can easily be buried by the immense desert sands that line the ten-mile wide oasis of the Nile River that is this country. 

Highly recommended for all readers of history, the Middle East muddle, and travel books. 

When you read this book, you learn that the Hesslers live in a Cairo apartment building adorned with ironwork spiderwebs.  There are no photos in the book, but Peter Hessler was kind enough to send me some.  He and his family now live back in China.         

 

“The Only Woman in the Room” by Marie Benedict, published by Sourcebooks Landmark, 2019 – a Short Book Review

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For a woman who had such a fascinating life, The Only Woman in the Room seemed like Hedy Lamarr “light.”  It’s a short book, a quick read.  It’s hard to keep in mind that it is a novel since it’s written in the first person. 

There is so much of Hedy Lamarr’s history that deserves expansion: her childhood in Vienna, the only child of successful Jewish parents; her immediate success on Austrian stage and screen; her marriage at 19 to an Austrian arms dealer to the fascists; her escape from her overbearing husband to the U.S., and subsequent success at MGM.  Perhaps most important is how she developed a patented scientific discovery involving shifting radio frequencies and torpedoes/missiles.   Last, but not least, what led her to six more marriages?

Subsequent to reading The Only Woman in the Room, I did look at her first movie, Ecstasy, which runs about 75 minutes with no more than 20 lines of dialogue.  It is referred to as an “art” movie, and the blocking and cinematography does seem advanced.  But the movie is dull, even the few nude scenes of Hedy as a nubile teen-ager.  Then I realized this was way too much time to spend on a subject of so little relevance to me, especially when there is so little information about how she and George Antheil, an avant-garde composer, developed their frequency hopping guidance system, adopted by the U.S. military three years after the Lamarr-Antheil patent expired.

Recommended for a light read about an interesting woman.

“Big Sky” by Kate Atkinson, published by Little, Brown & Company, 2019

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Atkinson is a writer of exceptional detective procedural and historical novels. Big Sky is the latest featuring her slightly muddled protagonist, Jackson Brodie. A retired police Detective Chief Inspector in a major city, he is now a humble private detective who followed a former lover to the seaside of Yorkshire to be with his teen age son, Nathan, and an aging black lab, Dido.

True to this type of plot, Brodie is hired to identify some baddies by the wife of a covert operator in human trafficking. The plot is interesting as Atkinson weaves the relationships among types of friends. According to Vince, one of the friends who recently lost his job and his wife, there are golf friends, work friends, old school friends—then there are friend friends, harder to come by. And, as we have experienced, when you are with a group of golf friends that contains several friend friends, it’s hard not to feel on the outside. But when friends are engaged in human trafficking, it’s good to be a bit on the outside.

This is a story told in the details. So savor the slow build and the rather predictable denouement. Recommended for a fun read of the Brit detective genre. Great fodder for a BBC-like series.

“The Snakes” by Sadie Jones, published by Harper, 2019 – Short Book Review

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Like a snake shedding its skin, The Snakes turns from a modern story on the effects of the acquisition and spending of infinite money on families into a murder thriller. Various feelings and suppressed concerns of the characters, Dan and Bea, lower middle-class young marrieds, Alex, brother of Bea and damaged family goods who manages a run-down hotel in France, Griff and Liv, parents escaping the unintended consequences of their lives. Bea shed her skin of privilege by leaving her family, happily working as a certified therapist among the undeserved and marrying Dan, a mixed-race artist scraping together a living as an estate broker.

Bea and Dan shed the humdrum of their lives by taking a three-month holiday touring the Continent. They stop to visit Alex. Clearly the hotel and his life are in shambles. His death/murder brings Griff and Liv to France and the plot takes off—but it’s about half-way through the book.

Enjoyable reading if you don’t mind a bit of gore and a realistic end. Good, facile writing.

“O My America! Six Women and Their Second Acts in a New World” by Sara Wheeler, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013

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The premise is fascinating. Six women who traveled to the new United States of America from England in the 19th century—none of them connected save that each wrote a memoir of the experience. They did not stay in the safe confines of New York and New England. They went to the interior via steam and sailboat, railroad, horseback and on foot. Each was or became financially independent, mostly because of their writing, and all eventually returned to England. I was familiar with two of them: Fanny Trollope, mother of Anthony Trollope, my favorite late 19th century British novelist, and Isabella Bird, a traveling Scots woman who “wintered” in Estes Park, Colorado with William Nugent, aka Comanche Bill, a renowned mountain man.

With an Introduction and six chapters, Wheeler tells the stories of these brave women, integrating them with her personal story as she approaches middle age. She follows the trails of her heroines’ journeys, not attempting to recreate the impossible, but gathering the shared images of the mountains, rivers and plains. Wheeler is also British and had an early awakening experience when she resettled in the U.S. and learned firsthand the value of our somewhat classless hospitality.

These are wonderful stories of extreme hardship that each give prismatic insight into our undeveloped country in the 19th century. Most of it is not pretty. But the take-away is that these women came unaided, for the most part worked unaided and turned their lives around. As a reader I found Wheeler’s intersticed thoughts on her own situation intrusive. Perhaps if I was turning 50, they would hold more meaning.

Recommended for readers who seek unique insights into U.S. history.

“The Soul of an Octopus:  A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness” by Sy Montgomery – Published by Atria 2015 – Review

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The Soul of an Octopus is a trip to the other side of animals – invertebrates.  Some invertebrates, such as clams don’t even have brains.  So how did the octopus develop consciousness?  Why are they able to carry on separate activities with their eight arms, processing different sensory input from each sucker or all?  How are they able to give and receive affection?

My only previous knowledge of octopuses was eating them—delicious basking in olive oil and grilled with little bits of crust on the skin.  And I will continue to do that.  But, after delving into their hidden world with naturalist Sy Montgomery, they will receive more respect.  We know so little about octopuses because theirs is a life of stealth and mystery.  They live alone, compressed safely into tiny spaces in the briny deep, venturing out only to kill and eat.  Eventually, near the end of the lives (usually five to eight years) they mate and die.  Not likely candidates for a best-selling book. 

Montgomery mostly experiences octopuses (pluralized with “es” not “I” because it is a Greek derivative, not Latin) at major aquariums, like the Cold Marine tank of the New England Aquarium in Boston.  Here they are exposed to the visitors, but mostly to the employees and volunteers who see this wild life through different eyes.  Employees and volunteers have relationships with fish and invertebrates; with tortoises and snakes; with all the aquarium inhabitants.

The Soul of an Octopus touches on all their stories both human and animal.  My most memorable take-away is Montgomery’s statement that Jane Goodall and her researchers did not reveal the most important findings of their work until 20 years after the first publications.  Though they found significant evidence of consciousness among apes and chimps , they did not reveal it for fear of their research being minimized as anthropomorphic.  Montgomery found it the same with the workers at the aquariums.  They rarely mention to outsiders the bonds they develop with their charges—not the bonds of an owner for a pet, but the bonds with other creatures capable of reciprocal feelings. 

Recommended for readers who enjoy quasi-scientific information combined with human interest stories. 

 

"Staying On" by Paul Scott - A Brief Review, Published by Heinemann, 1977

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A beautiful book about the end of things: The Raj in India, a volunteer’s joyful task of preparing the church for services, an old hotel that will be torn down and with it the home of the protagonists, and a life.  Paul Scott is the author of The Raj Quartet, the seminal set of novels about the end of the Raj in India.  In Staying On, he writes about two expats, husband and wife, who chose not to return home in 1947.

As the book opens, Tusker and Lucy Smalley (such Dickensian names) are barely keeping up appearances as the only British in a small Indian hill town in the north.  Though they have friends among the Indians, both middle and servant class, the Smalleys are not willing to completely drop the color bar drawn by the British.  They will never afford to return to England, so they make do, nursing feelings of rage for each other and their circumstances.  In spite of that, the book is charming, often funny. Staying On won the Booker Prize in 1977.

Scott is a masterful story teller and Staying On is the coda for his Raj Quartet.  Available at your library or used book store.

Highly recommended for readers of British/Indian historical fiction.