Alaa al Aswany made his literary mark in 2002 when he wrote The Yacoubian Building, a novel set in one apartment building in central Cairo in which virtually all the pressures within the country are illustrated. It was “the best-selling novel in the Middle East for two years and the inspiration for the biggest budget movie ever produced in Egypt,” according to National Geographic. Now Al Aswany may become even more famous for a series of articles he wrote for the Arabic press from 2005 to the present. Always a believer in human rights, which he believed were being trampled under the thirty-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, who appeared to be preparing the country for a handover of power to his son Gamal, the author became a vocal supporter of those who began to challenge Mubarak publicly beginning in 2005. In a series of regular articles and columns that he wrote for an Egyptian audience, Al Aswany used his popularity and literary power to try to reach all elements of Egyptian society, examining some of the issues which separated Egyptians from each other in an effort to show the importance of cooperation for the larger purpose of bringing about democracy in a country which had known only despotism, poverty, and corruption for decades. This book, published by the American University in Cairo Press, is a collection of these articles, written primarily between the summer of 2009 and October, 2010. Explaining complex issues in language which all can understand, Al Aswany worked toward a new beginning in Egypt
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Author Dieter Schlesak was only ten years old when the Russians invaded his town of Sighisoara in German Transylvania on August 1944, and he has been struggling to understand the Holocaust and how it happened ever since. Though he tried to write a novel about it once before, he says in a statement written in February, 2011, that he “threw 450 pages of an ‘author’s text’ into the wastebasket, because I, as an author, have absolutely no mandate, and could never, even stylistically or linguistically, approach such horror.” Schlesak, however, succeeds in creating a monumental analysis of Auschwitz, almost paralyzing in the completeness of its horror on every possible level, by using a “collective narrator,” a character he calls “Adam Salmen.” Adam as narrator is a Sondercommando of the Jewish “special action squad” under the Germans, a man whose agonizing job it is to report on the deaths in the gas chambers and the tallies of the cremation ovens. Photos, and much of Adam’s commentary, reflect the human side of the Holocaust, smaller pictures of real people performing real actions, rather than the overwhelming horrors of mass graves. Powerful and important.
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When Lisa Napoli, a journalist who had worked for public radio and CNN, attends a cookbook party in New York City, her friend Harris introduces her to a singularly attractive man. The handsome friend, Sebastian, is about to accompany him to Bhutan to do research for an article for Gourmet magazine. Napoli soon discovers through conversations with the two men that Bhutan is “the happiest place on earth” a place that keeps a “Gross National Happiness Index.” In the midst of a midlife crisis, Napoli feels she has “been there, done that” for too long in the same job, adrift socially after the breakup of a long-term relationship. Now forty-three and childless, she reluctantly returns to her job at her home base in Los Angeles. Three weeks later, she receives an e-mail, asking her if she’d like to go to Bhutan to help with the start-up of a radio station, Kuzoo FM. With scarcely a second thought, she obtains a six-week leave of absence from her job and takes off for Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom known as the Land of the Thunder Dragon.
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Eva Gabrielsson, the common-law wife of Swedish author Stieg Larsson, has finally published her own book about Larsson, his books, their thirty-two years of living together, and his legacy, which she believes has been sullied by his father and brother who have claimed the multimillion dollar estate and all rights to his work. According to Slate.com, Gabrielsson’s book, which is apparently her revenge against the commercialization of his legacy, also discusses the fourth book in the Millenium series, which is on a laptop in her posssession. The English translation of this book is available for pre-order on Amazon.com.
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Author Tierno Monenembo recreates the story of Aime Olivier de Sanderval, an almost forgotten Frenchman who followed a childhood dream by going to remote Africa in 1879, describing Olivier’s experiences in Guinea just before it became an unwilling colony of France. Olivier was not representing the government when he arrived in Guinea and did not believe in colonization in the traditional sense. An explorer with an almost mystical sense of destiny, he wanted to build a railroad from the beautiful hill country in the center of the country to the coast so that he could create trading posts and ultimately claim for himself the plateau of Fouta Djallon, “a land of rushing water and fruit, pure milk and wise men! The land that quenches your thirst.” The realities of tribal Guinea, with its internecine wars, its completely different cultures, and its total connection to the land intrude immediately upon his arrival, however. Naively, he tries to befriend the various groups and the leaders that he meets as he travels from the coast to central Guinea, but he has no conception of the long, historical rivalries among groups, of their experiences with previous white visitors, or of their ways of governing.
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