Cairo : The City Victorious

Rating:
Summary: Cairo: The City Victorious.
Review: Rodenbeck, a journalist for The Economist, has written a superior paean, one that mixes the intensity of first-hand experience with the fruits of a thorough immersion into the written record. The result is both jaunty and learned, a pleasing whole that will interest those who wish to imagine that exotic locale as well as those who have personally experienced the city and wish better to understand its rhythms. Few cities can inspire as interesting a book as Cairo: The City Victorious and few writers can carry it off as well as Rodenbeck.

Size and crowdedness tend to make Cairo less than a favorite for travelers - more a place to bear and get through than to enjoy. But if one can endure the noise, dirt, and traffic, there is much to discover. The city contains antiquities from an amazingly diverse collection of eras; only Rome can try to compete with Cairo's monuments that span the five thousand years from the great pyramids of Giza to the present. Rodenbeck breezes through ancient times and settles on the medieval era, then traces its decline during the dismal period 1500-1800. His account comes most to life in the late nineteenth century, when Cairo revived in the guise of a partially European city (in 1910, he reckons, one-eighth of the city was foreign-born) -- a heady, exciting place for the Europeanized elite.

"The first half of Cairo's twentieth century saw the West overwhelm the East. High heels and two-tones clattered up marble stairs; camelskin babouches rustled down. The century's second half saw the reverse: silken slippers shuffling down, bare peasant feet and army boots stomping up." After the coup of 1952 that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, Cairo then suffered, as did the whole country, under Nasser's tyranny and the cost of his foreign adventures. Even Rodenbeck's infectious narrative takes a somber turn, weighed down by totalitarian rule at home and military disaster abroad. Fortunately, things improved with Nasser's death in 1970 and the lighter rule of Sadat and Mubarak that followed, though our author finds much not to like in the present-day city. Fanatical Islamic sheikhs who would ban zucchini because of its suggestive shape are one sort of problem; the inevitable proliferation of McDonald's are another. Still, he counts on the city's "shambolic grandeur and operatic despair" to continue, on its "enduring, life-giving nonchalance" to sustain it beyond jihad or hamburgers.

Middle East Quarterly, September 1999

Rating:
Summary: "His-Story" of Cairo
Review: This book was a fun and quick read. I would have probably given it 2.5-3 stars had it not been for the overrated reviews already given the book and the fact that this book was published by a university press. I expected much more.

I found that while entertaining, the book was far from thorough and that it strayed every now and again into an occasional irresponsible comment - something one shouldn't expect from a university publication. In addition there was a heavy elitist bias.

Much of this book seems to be based on stray documents that have been cobbled together to form an extremely generalized and probably misleading portrait of Cairo throughout its multi-layered, several thousand year history (how does one cover the thousands of years of history of cairo in 350 pages?). The author's analysis of modern events also seemed somewhat schizophrenic and reflect his bias as a journalist for "The Economist".

Finally I think that this book about Cairo was written from the perspective of an outsider that seems to value the structures and institutions of Cairo beyond the welfare of the common people of Cairo. If given the opportunity to debate, many in Cairo would at least object to his analysis of the post-revolution period and beyond.

Rating:
Summary: Mad About Max!
Review: What a pleasure it was to read this book! Mr. Rodenbeck manages to cram a lot of fascinating information into just 267 pages. The book ranges over an enormous period of time, from the days of the pharoahs right up until the present. Obviously, in such a short book you can't go really in depth but somehow after you're done reading you feel that you really understand Cairo and the people who live there. I learned many interesting things. Did you know that a thousand years ago Cairo was full of apartment buildings that ranged from 7 stories up to possibly 14 stories high? The city was so small considering the size of the population that they had nowhere to go but up! Another fascinating fact was that when the pharoah Cheops had his pyramid built at Giza the specifications called for 2.3 million stone blocks of an average weight of 2.5 tons to be used. In order for the pyramid to be completed during the 30 years of Cheops's reign this meant that a stone block had to be into place every 2 minutes! I could go on and on. You learn something on every page: about the physical layout of the city and how it has changed over the centuries; its relationship to the Nile; the way the wealthy and the middle class and the poor live; the importance of Islam and the struggle to find a balance between religion and the secular world; about such leaders as Farouk, Nasser and Sadat; the occupation of Cairo by Napoleon and later on by the British. One of the best things about the book is that Mr. Rodenbeck does not let himself get in the way of this wonderful story. He describes the way things have been in the past and the way they are now and he doesn't preach or predict or otherwise feel the need to insert his ego into what he has written. This is really an excellent book!