An Egyptian adventure illuminated by Ward’s bubbly, curious personality.
The warm spirit of Egypt changes a woman’s life in this autobiographical adventure.
Randi Ward, a retired language arts teacher from Atlanta, Ga., never imagined she would come to see Egypt as a second home. However, during a vacation with her husband, she finds herself drawn to the culture and people of Cairo, and she stays in touch with some of her new friends on Facebook after returning to the U.S. She gets an unexpected offer from one—a three-month stint teaching English at a school in Cairo. Ward considers the idea for weeks; finally, despite speaking no Arabic, she decides to take a chance. Her life in Egypt is often frustrating: Her apartment is small and dingy, her Arabic never becomes strong enough for her to be fully independent, and her teaching schedule is taxing. Occasionally, life becomes frightening, as a wave of revolutionary protests sweeps through her neighborhood, forcing her to stay inside to avoid marches and tear gas. Ward makes it clear, however, that the warmth of her new life in Egypt far outweighs any challenges. Her students, who quickly become friends, invite her into their homes for family dinners and into their mosques for Friday prayers. Throughout the book, the author’s openness and curiosity about Egyptian food, customs, religious practices and history color all of her stories, although the nuts and bolts of teaching English as a second language could have been emphasized more. While the author praises her students’ intelligence and hard work, readers may want a bit more detail about her methods as well as the students’ progress over three months. However, moments like the anniversary of the 2011 Egyptian revolution more than make up for the lack of classroom scenes. Ms. Ward stands on the roof of the school with her students as a procession files through the streets below, carrying an immense Egyptian flag. Later, she and a student work their way through the throngs of people to join in the singing in Tahrir Square, which highlights the book’s main theme of how welcoming and inclusive Ward’s friends and students were to her, an outsider.
An Egyptian adventure illuminated by Ward’s bubbly, curious personality.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477289167
Page Count: 186
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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