bookshelf

REVOLUTION FOR DUMMIES

Name: REVOLUTION FOR DUMMIES
Author: Bassem Youssef
ISBN: 978-0-06-244689-3

LAUGHING THROUGH THE ARAB SPRING

by Bassem Youssef ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2017

If you want to understand the Arab Spring—even though it was really the African Spring, set off by a “small puny...

bookshelf

Egyptian comic Youssef, a doctor-turned-satirist–turned–international media sensation, recounts the revolution that brought down Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

The author had his moment in the sun when, by long and careful design, he wangled an appearance on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, billed as Egypt’s version of the American comic. He earned that designation, he writes here, by cosmic accident, having jumped in front of an American news camera to take over interpreting duties from a less-capable speaker of English during a demonstration in Cairo. The rest was history—if a very brief history, since Youssef fell from stardom just as quickly as he rose to it, his comedy show having fallen afoul of fundamentalists and government types alike. “My bleeped ‘profanity’ under the Islamist regime was celebrated as a form of resistance,” he writes, “but now everyone was a fucking prude.” Chaste and self-censoring, the new Egyptian society that followed Mubarak found no room for Youssef’s sensibilities, though he says, bitterly, that he was offered a show in exile but declined it for fear that he would be playing into his enemies’ hands. Youssef’s memoir often illustrates the old Belfast graffito that if you aren’t confused, you don’t know what’s going on. His account of the rise of Mohamed Morsi, a supposed revolutionary fully implicated in the old regime, is a case in point, with a familiar denouement: “Sure enough, after he and the Brotherhood won, they did what they do best: screwed everyone over. Let the games begin!” Youssef is usually funny, though occasionally he slathers on the bile a little too thickly. The effect is often as if some shock comic—Doug Stanhope, say—were taking it to The Man (or, better, The Mullah). Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

If you want to understand the Arab Spring—even though it was really the African Spring, set off by a “small puny motherfucking country called Tunisia”—then this odd book is just the guide.

Pub Date: March 21, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-06-244689-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MAGICAL REALITY OF NADIA
by Bassem Youssef & Catherine R. Daly ; illustrated by Douglas Holgate

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

bookshelf

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.