Cairo

Rating:
Summary: Yes, But It's Useful
Review: I can sympathize with teh reader who found Raymond's book boring and therefore gave it a middling rating. I used the French edition of this book for an MA years ago and while I found it useful because it is of the school of social history that digs out the facts and figures and puts them out there for us to use, it is most definitely useful, not fun. A ghost writer would have been a nice idea to make it an appealing book for general readers. For the academic writer who is looking for facts and figures to bolster an argument, this book is very useful, as are many of Raymond's boring books. Thus, I improve the rating by a star because the content is academically useful, if not intellectually or emotionally appeally beyond academic pursuits. This one's for the professors, and others should surely avoid.

Rating:
Summary: Less taste, more filling
Review: It's difficult to give this book a bad review, as it's a masterful, scholarly...collection of facts. The problem, and I don't believe it's entirely one of translation, is that there is little narrative throughout the book. It's a big book full of facts. Quite often, this reader got so bogged down in how many hectares Qahira covered as opposed to Fustat, or how many suqs were built in a given decade, that I lost track of where I was in the book. The only good narrative begins at the section where Maqrizi's era starts. But it doesn't hold out. I just sort of trudged on, feeling I wanted to finish, but without any joy in the reading or the discovery. It's too bad because Al Qahira is one of the world's great cities and a fascinating topic. I wish Raymond had gotten someone to ghost write.