I found that while entertaining, the book was far from thorough and that it strayed every now and again into an occasional irresponsible comment - something one shouldn't expect from a university publication. In addition there was a heavy elitist bias.

Much of this book seems to be based on stray documents that have been cobbled together to form an extremely generalized and probably misleading portrait of Cairo throughout its multi-layered, several thousand year history (how does one cover the thousands of years of history of cairo in 350 pages?). The author's analysis of modern events also seemed somewhat schizophrenic and reflect his bias as a journalist for "The Economist".

Finally I think that this book about Cairo was written from the perspective of an outsider that seems to value the structures and institutions of Cairo beyond the welfare of the common people of Cairo. If given the opportunity to debate, many in Cairo would at least object to his analysis of the post-revolution period and beyond.

A huge amount of serious research and very savvy analysis of trends produced an excellent work that flows easily like reading an article on the pages of good newspapers yet has the backing of tremendous research of history.

Sadly, however, there is an over reliance on work and analysis of discredited Orientalists, but the author's clear love and understanding for Cairo has saved the work from being colored by the arrogance of the racist historians he relied heavily on.

Size and crowdedness tend to make Cairo less than a favorite for travelers - more a place to bear and get through than to enjoy. But if one can endure the noise, dirt, and traffic, there is much to discover. The city contains antiquities from an amazingly diverse collection of eras; only Rome can try to compete with Cairo's monuments that span the five thousand years from the great pyramids of Giza to the present. Rodenbeck breezes through ancient times and settles on the medieval era, then traces its decline during the dismal period 1500-1800. His account comes most to life in the late nineteenth century, when Cairo revived in the guise of a partially European city (in 1910, he reckons, one-eighth of the city was foreign-born) -- a heady, exciting place for the Europeanized elite.

"The first half of Cairo's twentieth century saw the West overwhelm the East. High heels and two-tones clattered up marble stairs; camelskin babouches rustled down. The century's second half saw the reverse: silken slippers shuffling down, bare peasant feet and army boots stomping up." After the coup of 1952 that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, Cairo then suffered, as did the whole country, under Nasser's tyranny and the cost of his foreign adventures. Even Rodenbeck's infectious narrative takes a somber turn, weighed down by totalitarian rule at home and military disaster abroad. Fortunately, things improved with Nasser's death in 1970 and the lighter rule of Sadat and Mubarak that followed, though our author finds much not to like in the present-day city. Fanatical Islamic sheikhs who would ban zucchini because of its suggestive shape are one sort of problem; the inevitable proliferation of McDonald's are another. Still, he counts on the city's "shambolic grandeur and operatic despair" to continue, on its "enduring, life-giving nonchalance" to sustain it beyond jihad or hamburgers.

Middle East Quarterly, September 1999