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Letters of a Victorian Army Officer: Edward Wellesley 1840-54 (Army Records Society)
Manufacturer: Alan Sutton Publishing, Ltd.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0750910798 |
Book Description
In addition to presenting the complete story of the life of Hartley O. Baker, this book provides a thorough history of his Baker Steam Motor Car Company of Pueblo, Colorado. This history is documented through the use of company records and correspondence, company brochures, newspaper ads and articles, public records, patent records and drawings, and original photographs. The author interviewed dozens of people and searched all available records to compile this unique story. The result is a book that is sure to hold the attention and satisfy the curiosity of all automotive buffs, as well as those readers interested in a little known piece of Colorado and automotive history.
"The subject of this book is the late Dr. Hartley O. Baker who was a believer that the steam car could be improved and made a viable means of transportation. Under ordinary circumstances, his name would have been forgotten decades ago. Dr. Baker is remembered now by one who never knew him, Barbara Baker, the wife of one of his grandsons, who has been looking into the checkered life of this multi-faceted man, following all leads to show him as a vibrant living person. Her insight into the character Hartley O. Baker is one of crystal clarity and she has successfully painted a panorama of the man, and his automobile." Keith Marvin, Past President - The Society of Automotive Historians.
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- Great recipes, difficult layout
- Heal your family without paying costly medical bills!
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Cooking for Healthy Healing, Book Two: The Healing Recipes
Linda Page
Manufacturer: Healthy Healing Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Healthy Healing: A Guide to Self-Healing for Everyone, 12th Edition
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Cooking for Healthy Healing, Book 1: The Healing Diets
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Detoxification - All you need to know to recharge, renew and rejuvenate your body, mind and spirit!
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Diets for Healthy Healing: Dr. Linda Page's Natural Solutions to America's 10 Biggest Health Problems
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How to Be Your Own Herbal Pharmacist
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RESPeRATE Blood Pressure Lowering Device
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Airborne Effervescent Health Formula, Original Orange, 10 Tablets (Pack of 3)
ASIN: 1884334822 |
Book Description
Linda Page has been saying it for years: "Good food is good medicine!"
Now, in her new, revolutionary cook book set, she presents 80 healing programs in Cooking For Healthy Healing - Book One - The Healing Diets, and over 1000 healing recipes in Cooking For Healthy Healing - Book Two - The Healing Recipes. Complete with nutritional reference sections, a guide to cooking with whole foods, extensive cross-references between diets and recipes, macrobiotic and vegetarian sections, a special section on cooking with herbs for healing and much more!
In Cooking For Healthy Healing - Book Two - The Healing Recipes, there are over 1000 delicious recipes for healing: detoxification and cleansing; healing drinks and tonics; macrobiotic; enzyme rich; low-fat; salads; soups; dairy-free; wheat-free; seafood; mineral-rich; high-fiber; and vegetarian. Each recipe tells you how it can help your health; many provide important nutritional analysis and refer to the healing programs in Cooking For Healthy Healing - Book One - The Healing Diets.
Learn how to heal with every meal! Food really is your pharmacy for healing!
Customer Reviews:
Great recipes, difficult layout.......2007-10-04
I love lots of the recipes in this book. However, it is frequently hard to find them again under the somewhat vague chapter titles such as, "Fiber Makes Your Day," "Blending East and West," "Mineral Rich Recipes." If you have a favorite recipe, it's sometimes difficult to find it again. You have to remind yourself whether or not it's a good enzyme food or perhaps a macrobiotic something that caught your eye. Forget trying to find it in the index. I've highlighted the recipes that I really like so that I can find them again without resorting to flipping through all the pages again. Also, there isn't a whole lot that's specifically indicated as being beneficial for pregnancy--though I am sure lots of the recipes are great. Overall, it's a great cookbook--the layout and organization just leaves a bit to be desired.
Heal your family without paying costly medical bills!.......2004-07-14
I loved this book and what it brings to the table. Enzymes and natural health. You can look all day long at cooking shows on TV but never find the most critical ingredient - healthy living foods.
Book Description
Living among Meat Eaters is the book for the over 20 million Americans who have adopted vegetarianism. In this mind-bending yet practical volume, Carol J. Adams discusses summer barbecues, Thanksgiving dinner, even the simple business lunch, which can all be cause for issues-packed discussions on the vegetarian lifestyle. This book also offers more than 50 mouth-watering vegetarian recipes that work! Living among Meat Eaters will continue to be every vegetarian's (and vegan's) most trusted source of support and information.
Customer Reviews:
Got a refund........2006-12-19
I had high hopes for this book, but was quickly turned off and ended up returning it to the store. The author's condescending attitude promotes a number of the ideas behind the negative stereotype many people have of vegans today.
Meat eaters are Blocked Vegetarians!.......2006-08-14
Very helpful, in some ways, funny book. Would be a good book for parents of children who want to be vegetarian.
Very comforting to hear from other people all the rude things that meat eaters do say to vegetarians. I mean unless you are a pig farmer what do you care what I eat?
But I admit I have been guilty of describing chicken slaughter to a meat eater who did not want to hear it. But if you are willing to eat it, why are you not willing to hear how it is killed?
Humor, Wit and Insight.......2005-10-27
This book was a very happy surprise. When I bought this title, I was pleasantly lulled into thinking it would be exactly what the book goes on to say is not needed, which is another set of clever answers to meat eater questions. I was and am profoundly pleased and surprised to find this book to be a work of philosophy, deep insight, wonderful humor and a good read. A major premise, that meat eaters are all "blocked vegetarians" can be taken out of the absolutely literal context some people favor. It's an idea that is well-explored and examined in this work and the reader is invited to see if it holds up. This book does not demand you agree with it, it invites you to think differently about things possibly taken for granted or that have remained unexamined. In other words, a kind invitation to explore a very fundamental part of life: what you eat, who you eat with and what everyone's assumptions about it all are.
A Fascinating Guide for Preventing Meat Drama.......2005-10-22
This is an immensely practical book. I highly recommend it to any vegetarian interested in outreach & activism; any vegetarian who simply desires to understand the social dynamics of vegetarianism & meat-eating; and also any vegetarian who wishes to live a happier, more secure life.
I moderate an online vegan community, and the troubling effects of meat-eaters' belligerent and irrational responses to a vegetarian in their midst are a frequent subject. This book has helped me understand the psychological underpinnings of such situations and provides a wealth of advice on how to defuse the drama and give meat-eaters space for self-examination. It also functions as a guide for vegans and vegetarians on examining their own feelings about their choice, with the goal of making them more confident, happy, & secure, and thusly more capable of dealing calmly and rationally with unpleasant interactions.
Caveats:
1. The author is "very vegetarian" (as her shirt in the author photo states); unfortunately, some of her hardline stance does show through, both in her thesis (see below) and her apparent belief that animal-rights concerns trump all others. For instance, she suggests that any vegetarian who purchases leather is behaving unethically, while I (and many other ethical vegetarians) believe purchasing animal products at non-profit thrift stores is preferable to purchasing new synthetics at some major retailer, as you avoid wasteful consumption, support worthwhile charities, and don't contribute to the environmental impact of synthetics, all without contributing to companies that cause animal suffering. Vegans tend to be opinionated folk, though, so I can forgive her an occasional oversimplification of the issues.
2. I don't entirely agree with the author's thesis, that all meat-eaters are "blocked vegetarians." A member of the community I moderate compared that to claiming that all homophobes were "blocked gays." Another member found the crux of the matter, I think: homophobes and aggressive meat-eaters may not be "blocked," exactly, but they both externalize the confusion and anger they feel when forced to examine their own fundamental choices and assumptions. So, while the author's premise may not be 100% accurate, I think it's an effective working model when dealing with meat-eaters. And that makes this a very valuable book for vegetarians who find themselves subject to unwelcome attention.
Even with those caveats, this book should be read by every vegetarian, the earlier the better, and it belongs on the shelf of all who find themselves dealing with over-emotional meat-eaters (or the fallout thereof) on a regular basis.
To bad I hadn't read this sooner.........2005-10-07
I didn't read this book until six months after I chose to live a veg lifestyle. I wish I could have read it the first day, it might have prepared me for the barage of negativity I got. You don't have to subscribe to all of her opinions, but the advice in how to appropriately deal with other people is invaluable. I have personally encountered many of the "types" of people she describes and how they choose to attack you. This book reminds you to always be respectful of others chosen lifestyles and gives you good advice on how to stand your grand while doing so.
Book Description
From two noted experts-the first in-depth book on teaching your bird to talk
Teaching a bird to talk isn't as difficult as it may seem. In this easy-to-follow guide, avian experts Diane Grindol and Tom Roudybush reveal how you can communicate with your parrot far beyond "hello" and, in turn, understand what your bird is trying to communicate to you.
Teaching Your Bird to Talk compiles an impressive amount of background, training, and research regarding bird vocalizations, walking you step by step through the behavioral mechanics of training parrots to talk (as well as starlings, mynahs, and other birds). Whether you want your bird to mimic words, talk on cue, or have some understanding of what you are saying, this guide shows you the type of training you need to do with your bird. The book also takes a close look at the work of Dr. Irene Pepperberg-the world's foremost authority in the field of parrot intelligence and trainer of Alex the African Grey Parrot.
- Identifies which species of bird are likely to talk and which aren't
- Explores field research on regional languages and dialects of parrots in the wild
- Features true stories from owners of talking birds
- Explains how to handle problems with vocal parrots, such as screaming and using inappropriate language
- Offers tips on feeding and housing birds, and finding an avian veterinarian
Download Description
From two noted experts, the first in-depth book on teaching a bird to talk. Teaching a bird to talk isnt as difficult as it may seem. This easy-to-follow book walks the reader step by step through the behavioral mechanics of teaching a bird to talk, covering the species likely to talk, the anatomical reasons a bird can talk, and the way a parrot picks up language. It explores field research showing that parrots have regional languages and dialects in the wild and also takes a close look at the work of Dr. Irene Pepperberg, an undisputed authority and well-known researcher in the field of parrot intelligence, who was interviewed extensively for this book.
Customer Reviews:
Teaching Your Bird to Talk review.......2007-07-28
I am not quite finished with this book yet, but I am very pleased with the information and how it is presented in this book. I have read several other books on Parrots and this is by far the best one. There is more information than just teaching your bird to talk.
I highly recomment this book to anyone who owns a parrot with the potential to talk!
My parrot started to talk !.......2006-11-17
I waited more than six months after I bought this book to try the techniques inside it before I wrote my review. Although I was using some methods mentioned inside the book but this book encouraged me to keep using them and also adds some amazing methods and ideas that were very helpful, useful and easy to imply. Simply, my old African Grey Parrot started to talk, and that was my fist experience in such thing and I really feel grateful to this book and to the efforts inside it. I am giving four stars since I feel some information are ideas need proves rather than facts. However, aiming to make your African talk, buy this book and be patient.
Very good........2006-11-05
A wonderful reference and book guide for teaching a Quaker Parrot to talk.
Teaching Your Bird to Talk.......2006-02-27
When I bought this book I thought I was buying a book that would help me teach my parrot to talk. Although I do know that there are no guarantees about which bird will talk and what method works, I wanted tips and advice on how to help my parrot learn.
This books gives no such information. It covers why parrots talk, which parrots talk and lots of stories about talking parrots, but no real information on teaching my bird to talk. The only chapter I liked was the one about the Model/Rival-method, which is a detailed chapter on teaching a parrot to talk with cognition, understanding the words it uses. However, the bird must alredy be talking for this method to work.
What I wanted was an answer to these questions: Do constant, out of context, repetitions work? Does plaing a casette work? Would it help to have talking sessions? Does my tone of voice matter? How can I get my bird to talk more clearly? How can I get my bird to talk in front of strangers?
This book has good basic information for the beginner in bird care or ownership as well as advanced information........2005-08-14
Two authors have teamed up to write this book titled Teaching Your Bird to Talk. The two of them have plenty of experience with birds.
The first chapter is a "must read" for someone just thinking about bringing a bird into the family. All to often, the idea of having a pet that can talk to you, overshadows the time and commitment required to look after this pet.
To help us understand a little about talking, they give information about how and why birds make sounds. Birds that make sounds all year round instead of just at breeding times may be possible good talkers.
If a talking bird is what you are looking for, the chapter Who Talks and Who Doesn't will be of interest to you. It is also expained that not every bird in the talking list will talk, but they have the potential to talk. The birds that talk clearly are identified as well as the birds that simply do not talk. Although parrots are the most common talking birds, there is also a list of non-parrot birds that are known for talking ability.
The chapter Parrots Jump Into The Conversation contains input from several people who wrote in about conversations with their pet birds and is a lot of fun to read.
The Model/Rival Training Technique chapter explains how this method of training is used and this is the way that Alex, the famous African Grey Parrot belonging to Dr. Pepperberg was trained.
Of course, the whole book is not just about teaching your bird to talk. There is wonderful advice on general pet bird care, solving problems, playing games with your bird, and what to do if your bird turns out to be a non talker.
This book has good basic information for the beginner in bird care or ownership as well as advanced information for those who have experience with birds.
Book Description
How to share healing messages with the horses in your life.
A top animal healer reveals how to share healing messages with the horses in your life.
Following the success of Healing for Horses, Margrit Coates explains how to interact with equines on a deep level. She gives practical advice on how to tune into your horse and understand what it is trying to communicate to you about well-being. She shows how to sense what a horse is feeling and when it is healthy or suffering. You will also learn how to exchange healing messages, soul to soul, with your horse in order to strengthen the bond between you.
Included are many fascinating case histories of horses and those who care for them, showing how they have mutually benefited by learning to open the channels of communication.
Intended for every horse owner, rider and handler — and the many thousands of people who work with horses including vets, complementary therapists, grooms, stable hands, trainers, instructors and breeders. This book is for anyone who loves horses.
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Your Talking Pet
Ann Walker
Manufacturer: Capall Bann Pub
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Animal Care & Pets
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ASIN: 1898307873 |
Customer Reviews:
I TalkTo My Animals.......2001-08-11
I talk to my animals and they talk to me, this book helped me understand more as it gave a lot of information about non verbal language. All Pet owners should read it.
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Your Talking Pet
Ann Walker
Manufacturer: Broomtail Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0646204645 |
Book Description
There is a growing movement in this country towards an interest in knitting as a craft and a spiritual practice. Tara Jon Manning, expert knitter and the author of Mindful Knitting, uses her background in Shambhala Buddhism and Eastern arts to incorporate these two seemingly disparate ideas in her compelling new knitting book, Compassionate Knitting
Compassionate Knitting: Finding Basic Goodness in the Work of Our Hands is a knitting book unlike any other. The 20 original-design projects included in this book range from small accessory items and gifts to wearable garments-all of which include personal ritual in their creation or use. Each project is inspired by an element of the world around us, based on a contemplative theme drawn from Shambhala Buddhism and Eastern arts or, in some cases, Western notions of the magical and mindful.
The unique projects featured in this creative new book invite readers to develop significant and satisfying connections to their projects, the knitting process and those for whom they knit. Knitters can deepen their relationship with the craft and explore how it inspires compassion and connection with the basic goodness in the world. Continuing the author's concept of mindful knitting, Compassionate Knitting encourages readers to relax in the moment, and provides readers with a path for personal development through knitting.
Customer Reviews:
Low on compassion; high on projects.......2006-06-30
This book is supposed to be a follow up to Tara Joe Manning's Mindful Knitting, however, it is less of a follow-up and more of an appendix to her other book.
First off, the title is where you will find the most "compassion" in the book. There is barely any discourse on the subject and if you are to truley knit with her brand of "compassion" or "mindfulness" then you are assumed to have read the first book. There is almost no explanation of compassion, holding mindfulness, or knitting as meditation in this slim volume, unless you count one or two sentences in the two-page introduction.
This slim volume contains very cute "zen style" patterns. The cloud pillow, stars jumper set for a child and other items are simply lovely, modern and clean in style without being too fussy or full of knitting cliches.
Perhaps what is disappointing to me is that I was looking for a discussion of compassionate knitting and not simply a catchy title for a slim volume of cute patterns. A more appropriate title would have been, Knitting Patterns in a "Zen" Style for Today's Knitter.
Seeking Harmony of Heaven, Earth, and Knitter.......2006-04-25
"Compassionate Knitting", Tara Jon Manning's second knitting book, futher explores the relationship between mindfulness, knitting, and developing a compassionate outlook, the subject she explores in her first book "Mindful Knitting." There isn't a whole lot ot text or instruction in "Compassionate Knitting", just a few pages that explain how the knitting designs presented in this book are inspired by nature or by the concepts of healing or soothing. There are 20 designs, most of which are very simple. Several of the more attractive designs have nature-inspired motifs, such as a "Cloud Pillow" which is nicely adorned with knitted-in cloud designs.
I have to say that I was not overly impressed with most of the clothing designs presented here, except for the home decor ideas. THe garment designs presented here are quite blocky in nature.
My other reservation in recommending this book is that it does not offer much knitting instruction. This book presumes that the reader has mastered most basic knitting skills. To me, this book was more about inspiring meditation than inspiring knitting.
The heart of knitting.......2006-03-30
I really enjoyed this book! I have always thought that knitting was more about the process than the product. When you knit from the heart and give your knit item as a gift you are giving so much more than just the item at hand...you are giving love and a bit of yourself.
My daughter loved the look of the angels and fairies in the book.
I loved the Padma Jacket, the colorful pictures in the center of the book and also The Folklore of Aran Stitches in the back of the book(it is wonderful to know the greater meaning behind some of the stitches we use!)
Buddhist philosophy and knitting objectives.......2006-03-19
Twenty original knitting projects within are meant to convey a special meaning to the project, whether it be a good luck symbol, serenity, or imparting confidence, and noted knitwear designer Tara Jon Manning shows how to tap into this compassion blending Buddhist philosophy with knitting objectives in a unique blend of spiritual and knitter's guide. Knitters will appreciate the unusual blend which fosters both creative and soulful projects.
Overpriced book with sloppy, shapeless designs.......2006-03-02
I was very disappointed in this book. Most of the patterns are similar to what you can find in any free pattern search done on the Web. The women's designs are sloppy and look as if they will hang on the body without any shape. If you were to use the yarns called for the cardigans could end up costing nearly $200.00. The sachet bag, mittens, scarf, baby sweater, and toque are ubiquitous on the web or in any beginning knitting book and certainly not worth the price of the book.
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An Illustrated Gardener's Notebook (Illustrated Notebooks)
Juliette Clarke
Manufacturer: Exley Giftbooks
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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Fiskars Phone and Garden Pocket #94336974
ASIN: 1850151199 |
Book Description
When Love Dies is based on two rich sources of information gathered by the author. Karen Kayser first analyzes in-depth and revealing interviews with 49 spouses who recount their feelings, thoughts, and actions as they fell out of love with their partners. Chapters trace the slow dissolution of love and its impact on a marriage, from the onset of marital disaffection to its final stages. Kayser then incorporates data from a random sample survey, comparing troubled spouses with non-disaffected spouses and exploring the relationships among marital disaffection, psychological well-being, commitment, attribution, and gender. The book examines the concept of matrimony from broad theories of marriage as a social institution to the most specific nuances of spousal interaction. Kayser shows that by studying the dynamics that produce disaffection, partners are able to focus on ways to better understand what is needed to maintain love in marriage. Identifying the phases of disaffection, including significant turning points, can alert spouses and clinicians that it is time to confront problems of alienation. Clinical recommendations for repairing marriages are offered for each phase of the disaffection process. The book also provides a scale of marital disaffection that is of practical use to clinicians and researchers.
Customer Reviews:
A wonderful book - knowing there are millions who feel just.......1999-01-11
A good book. Period. Whether you are divorced or not. Maybe everyone should read it BEFORE they get married. It's always been encouraging to me to realize there are at least a million other people out there, who have the same thoughts and feelings! It should be required reading for every marriage counselor!
Average customer rating:
- Growing up Jewish in Alexandria
- lovely childhood memoir
- Wonderful writing, wonderful memoir
- Nostalgia for the Alexandria tram and beaches
- A portrait of ethnic cleansing in Egypt
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Out of Egypt: A Memoir
Andre Aciman
Manufacturer: Riverhead Trade
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Binding: Paperback
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Kaaterskill Falls
ASIN: 1573225347 |
Customer Reviews:
Growing up Jewish in Alexandria.......2007-07-12
REVIEW OF "OUT OF EGYPT" for Amazon.com July 12, 2007
Andre Aciman describes his colorful and complicated life (and family)in
Alexandria in the 1960s. Childhoods like that are often the preparation
for a life of writing. The child absorbs all the peculiarities as part of
normal life without knowing they are peculiar until much later. Then they
need to make sense of it all.
All this is heightened by the fact that the Acimans are Jewish, in a
Muslim country still resonating with the after effects of British rule.His
experiences in the theoretically best school in Alexandria, run by
British teachers, would be funny if they weren't so awful. For complete
cognitive dissonance,his parents force him to learn Arabic to survive.
Reading about those lessons alone is worth the price of this book. At
home they speak Ladino, the Sephardic Yiddish, among themselves.
His beautful mother was born deaf. When provoked she can produce a
high-pitched scream. used to good effect at the butcher's. Once she has
made her point they are all quite happy. The butcher has to give the package
to her Arab servant. She never touches an Arab's hand.
The Acimans and Andre's maternal relatives live in a state of mutual
scorn, but when faced with the threats of Pan-Arab nationalism pull together very
efficiently. Eventually they all flee, the sedate Sephardic merchants
and the shady international adventurers too.
Two other writers come to mind when reading this book. Laurence Durrell
evokes something of the same atmosphere in his Alexandria Quartet and Elias
Canetti grew up in a large Sephardic family in Bulgaria. That society has
completely disappeared. Without Canetti's memoirs one would not know it had ever
existed.
This is an eloquent and elegiac account of that love and absurdity
known as a family.
lovely childhood memoir.......2007-07-06
Aciman wrote this book not only being 'Out of Egypt' like Blixen was 'Out of Africa', but as well being "Out of Childhood'. So the grown-up is looking back and remembers his extended family with live-in servants and longtime friends. Whoever loves family stories will enjoy this well-written book.
Having myself spent some summers in Egypt I would say that his kind of Egypt isn't gone completely - there is still, beneath the noise of the traffic and industries, the chit-chat of the doorkeepers, sharellas and nannies. Or the difference of daily lives in regular, in summer, during the ramadan. Egypt still works as a time machine.
Wonderful writing, wonderful memoir.......2007-01-30
This memoir is the very best I've read. It takes the author from his earliest years as part of a large Jewish family which moved from Turkey to Alexandria (he was born in 1951), through the air raid sirens during Suez war with France and England, to the expulsion of the Jews by Nasser in the late 1950s, and then on to his adulthood in America and his return to Egypt following his marriage. After a lengthy opening section dating roughly from age 5 or 6, the narrative skillfully skips back and forth in time. The descriptions of the boy's exotic world and his dysfunctional extended family are priceless, as are the re-invented conversations and arguments among the adults who surround him. There is something Proust-like in the writing, a love of detail for the texture it creates, and something Nabokov-like as well, in the hooded humor and artful language. I found it utterly captivating and written with love, especially for his mother, who was born deaf. I heartily recommend it to anyone who contemplates or is writing a memoir.
Nostalgia for the Alexandria tram and beaches.......2006-08-15
Andre Aciman's Out of Egypt is an amazing book, I found it very hard to put down. At a time of increased hostility in the middle east it is heartwarming to read of a time when Jews lived in peace with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in Alexandria. Not a whiff of anti Jewish sentiments was reported by Aciman until after the Suez War. Aciman and his family left Egypt in the sixties.
Aciman, like many "Egyptian" Jews preferred to hold European nationalities and in some cases some were French or Italian without ever setting foot in these countries. Europeans had their own courts in Egypt and did not fall under Egyptian Laws. For Aciman, born and raised in Egypt and in many ways no different than many affluent Alexandrians life became unbearable after the waves of Nationalization in the early 60's.
Aciman writes of an Alexandria that no longer exists not just for Egyptian Jews. The population explosion in Egypt has transformed Alexandria beyond recognition; hence Aciman's beautiful writing of Alexandria, its beaches and its tram will bring floods of memories for anyone who's known Alexandria.
Affluent Egyptian Jews who left Egypt in the fifties and sixties are not immediately thought of as refugees and there is little discussion on their issues of identity and affiliation in Egypt and elsewhere. Aciman through his acute sensitivity to the people and events around him and his wonderful story telling skills has produced beautifully written and very touching book that subtly challenges many assumptions on all sides.
Readers will see the very same Alexandria in Leila Ahmed's Border Passage and in parts of Ahdaf Souief's In the Eye of the Sun. Enjoy
A portrait of ethnic cleansing in Egypt.......2005-08-25
As another reviewer noted, it takes a while for the reader to get his/her bearings about the ties of blood and marriage among the characters in Aciman's memoir. The beautifully written book then becomes an elegy for a lost way of life as the cosmopolitan city that Alexander the Great had founded and that remained significantly Greek through the time of Cavafy, but underwent "ethnic cleansing" by Nasser's United Arab Republic.
It seems to me that Aciman considered himself an Alexandrian, and that he could not be "Egyptian." To say that he was a poor student of Arabic without noting that the Arabic textbooks he was supposed to use and memorize from were filled with demonization of Jews (as the first reviewer here did) is deeply tendentious. Yes, the young Aciman lived a life of privilege in a colonial (British) state (and in the kingdom of the playboy King Farouk), but post-World War II Arab states (with the Saudis supplying the kind of propaganda demonizing Jews at which Aciman bridled) did not treat "peoples of the book" as the Ottomans had. The discourse of racism documented by Aciman's memoir is of Islamist Jew-hating. Perhaps the reviewer did not actually read the book despite passing as "a reader"?
That said, Marcel Bénabou's more difficult _Jacob, Menahem, and Mimoun_ provides an account of expulsion of Jews from another Arab ethnic cleansing (in Morocco) with more geopolitical detail and similar colorful relatives for those more interested in macro history than the micro history of which Aciman supplies an exquisite slice.
Book Description
This richly colored memoir chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family, from its bold arrival in cosmopolitan Alexandria to its defeated exodus three generations later. In elegant and witty prose, Andr Aciman introduces us to the marvelous eccentrics who shaped his lifeUncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; Aunt Flora, the German refugee who warns that Jews lose everything at least twice in their lives. And through it all, we come to know a boy who, even as he longs for a wider world, does not want to be led, forever, out of Egypt.
Customer Reviews:
Out of Egypt.......2007-09-30
Out of Egypt, is a very special memoir about growing up in Alexandria before the author and his family were forced to move from Egypt in 1965 . It's a fascinating memoir of a time and place that no longer exists, and a wonderfully written account .
Book Description
A humorous look at a boy's growing up experiences in small town and rural America during the 1930's and 40's. His problems are cast against the profound changes in American society brought by the Great Depression and World War II.
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