Cairo: The City Victorious by Max Rodenbeck

Posted by J

Cairo: The City Victoriousby Max Rodenbeck

Click here to purchase
Reporter Max Rodenbeck has lived much of his life in Cairo and gives a sweeping and highly enjoyable overview of the city in a style that is a wonderful mixture of history and storytelling. Mixing historical facts, personal experiences, and anecdotes, he paints a picture of a city that in many ways is a microcosm of the entire Middle East. One walks away from this book having felt a sense of what it was like to live in ancient Egypt's capital of Memphis with the same sort of intimacy one gets to know the medieval city and today's boisterous developing-world metropolis. Pious and lecherous, ancient yet constantly renewing, full of beautiful artistic expression and hundreds-of-years-old refuse, Cairo is a city that overwhelms the senses while invigorating them. In many ways the book defies description and categorization. It is perhaps enough to say that it is an extremely enjoyable read from which you will walk away having truly learned what makes one of the greatest cities in the Middle East (and the world) tick.