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A best-selling modern masterpiece in the author's home country of Egypt, Taxi consists of fifty-eight fictional monologues with Cairo taxi drivers that have been recreated from the author's own experience, taking the reader on a roller-coaster of emotions as bumpy and noisy as the city's potholed and chaotic streets. Described as an urban sociology, an ethnography, a classic of oral history - and a work of poetry in motion - it tells Herculean tales of the struggle for survival and dignity among Greater Cairo's 80,000 cab drivers.
First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
An autobiographical account of a journey into extremism
This volume brings together some of the leading researchers on early Islamic history and thought to study the legitimacy of violence.
Everything you need to start eating clean Whether you've lived on white carbs and trans fats all your life or you're already health conscious but want to clean up your diet even further, Eating Clean For Dummies, 2nd Edition explains in plain English exactly what it means to keep a clean-eating diet. Brought to you by a respected MD and licensed nutritionist, it sets the record straight on this lifestyle choice and includes recipes, the latest superfoods, tips and strategies for navigating the grocery store, advice on dining out, and practical guidance on becoming a clean eater for life. Clean eating is not another diet fad; it's used as a way of life to improve overall health, prevent disea...
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANN PATCHETTIn rural Illinois two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, until jealously leads to murder and suicide. A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers - the narrator, whose mother has died young, and Cletus Smith, the troubled witness to his parent's misery - is shattered. Fifty years on, the narrator mourns words left unsaid, and attempts a reconstruction of those devastating events and the atonement of a lifetime's regret.
Readings from literary works that re-construct a century of Cairo's changing social life. Unlike The Literary Atlas of Cairo, which focuses on the literary geopolitics of the cityscape, this companion volume immerses the reader in the complex network of socioeconomic and cultural lives in the city. The seven chapters first introduce the reader to representations of some of Cairo's prominent profiles, both political and cultural, and their impact on the city's literary geography, before presenting a spectrum of readings of the city by its multiethnic, multinational, and multilingual writers across class, gender, and generation. Daunting images of colonial school experiences and startling cont...
In 1986, when this autobiography opens, the author is a typical fourteen-year-old boy in Asyut in Upper Egypt. Attracted at first by the image of a radical Islamist group as "strong Muslims," his involvement develops until he finds himself deeply committed to its beliefs and implicated in its activities. This ends when, as he leaves the university following a demonstration, he is arrested. Prison, a return to life on the outside, and attending Cairo University all lead to Khaled al-Berry's eventual alienation from radical Islam. This book opens a window onto the mind of an extremist who turns out to be disarmingly like many other clever adolescents, and bears witness to a history with whose reverberations we continue to live. It also serves as an intelligent and critical guide for the reader to the movement's unfamiliar debates and preoccupations, motives and intentions. Fluently written, intellectually gripping, exciting, and often funny, Life Is More Beautiful than Paradise provides a vital key to the understanding of a world that is both a source of fear and a magnet of curiosity for the west.
Brought up in poverty in a remote part of an unstable Arab republic, the narrator studies Islamic law and Arabic and becomes a cleric and civil servant in the capital. At the age of almost 40 he accepts a position as imam of a mosque serving his compatriots in a richer and more cosmopolitan neighboring Arab country. His humdrum life changes when an educated and independent woman recruits him as consultant for a book on the great tenth-century Arab poet al- Mutanabbi. As their work together on his poetry leads to friendship and then love, the imam becomes embroiled in ideological conflict with activist Islamists at his mosque. Taken into protective custody after his enemies declare him apostate, and separated from the woman he loves, the imam chronicles how their relationship opened his eyes to a new world and taught him to overcome his old inhibitions. Judgment Day touches on debates within contemporary Islam and on the transformative and humanizing power of love between men and women.
In 2004, late in her legendary career, Ágota Kristóf wrote this slim dagger of a memoir about being a refugee after fleeing Hungary in 1956 Narrated in a series of stark, brief vignettes, The Illiterate is Ágota Kristóf’s memoir of her childhood, her escape from Hungary in 1956 with her husband and small child, her early years working in factories in Switzerland, and the writing of her first novel, The Notebook. Few writers can convey so much in so little space. Fierce yet almost pointedly flat and documentarian in tone, Kristóf portrays with a disturbing level of detail and directness an implacable message of loss: first, she is forced to learn Russian as a child (with the Soviet tak...