Cairo: The City Victorious (Vintage Departures)

by Max Rodenbeck (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $19.31

• Used

  Hardcover
  1998

  $4.20

  Every great city deserves a book like this one: a sweeping chronicle by an author whose motives mix passion and bewilderment. Over the course of four and a half millennia, Cairo has eluded all who would try to pin it down, reinventing itself time and again: It has survived countless invasions, booms and busts, famines, plagues, and calamities. Author Max Rodenbeck, a correspondent for the Economist, moved to Cairo as a 2 year old, and has spent a good portion of his professional life working there. He finds himself repulsed by the crowds and pollution of a late 20th-century megacity, yet drawn by Cairo's ageless vibrancy. Cairo: The City Victorious combines wide-ranging history and first-person travelogue in an unconventional narrative that bounces easily from the present to the past and back again. ( If the story were to loop and tangle and digress, he writes, well, that too would be in the character of Cairo. ) Immersed in Rodenbeck's prose, readers will find themselves feeling at home as they discover (or rediscover) this unique place, its pyramids, and its people.