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Playing Cards in Cairo
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List Price: £10.99
egypt.mktgs.co.uk Price: £8.49
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Manufacturer: Abacus
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780349119793
ISBN: 0349119791
Label: Abacus
Manufacturer: Abacus
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2008-04-03
Publisher: Abacus
Studio: Abacus
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Well written
Comment: This is well written as the writer has clearly immersed himself in the Egyptian culture, interweaving a story of Egyptian recent history and culture with the Egyptian people of today.
My only gripe with this book is that he doesn`t go into great detail about his personal love aspect in Egypt, moreover dwelling more on the other people in the novel. It would have worked better if he had paralleled his love aspect a bit more as it was written by a non-Egyptian. The parallel would have given it more substance.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fresh.
Comment: An engaging read, and rather unique mix of romance and hard nosed social comment. Miles, a sympathetic listener and voracious fact finder, has created an original and entertaining work.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Stuff
Comment: It was always going to be difficult and controversial for an Englishman to write a book about Egyptian women, but Hugh Miles manages it brilliantly. Placing himself and his relationship with one of them at the heart of his story, he never lets his readers forget the perspective from which the world he describes is being viewed.
Miles lets us in through the back door to eavesdrop on young middle-class Egyptian women talking about their lives. And their lives aren't easy: they have to cope with authoritarian husbands and brothers; one of them is addicted to prescription drugs; another is suffering from the after-effects of botched plastic surgery.
It's not all hardship, however. We also learn about their hopes, dreams, secret lovers and, above all, their friendships with each other which sustain them.
A consummate journalist, Miles lets the people he's writing about, people whose voices are rarely heard, speak for themselves.
This is an important and groundbreaking book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, an unusually candid insight into Muslim society
Comment: This book has the potential to appeal to a lot of different people. From the outside it looks like a romance that belongs in the travel section or perhaps the cards and games shelf of your local bookshop.
But the card games of the title (which enabled Hugh Miles to meet and fall in love with an Egyptian girl) are just a device, the narrative key to a treasure trove of stories about the lives and loves of women in Muslim society. The result is a compassionate book, very funny at times and truly shocking at others, which provides an outstanding documentary insight into a topic that is a mystery to most of us in the west, and it would seem, a taboo subject for many Muslim men.
The characters and relationships illustrate the difficulties that Egyptian women face (such as trying to find a suitable boy while under the vigilant discipline of one's own family) and - brilliantly and wonderfully - how they rise above those problems. The women's ingenuity and spirit as they subtly resist and defy their own fathers and brothers is inspiring and moving.
Miles had a privileged insider's view because the girl he fell in love with was unusually free of family ties and thus more able than most to associate with a foreign man. The women whose stories he tells are literate, metropolitan and relatively liberal, and I am sure that there are millions of women who have an even tougher time in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world.
This is a stunning, informative, insider's look at real lives in a society that I knew almost nothing about. Miles has unlocked the secrets and I will never feel the same again when I see a woman in a headscarf.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Uncovering New Challenges in Egyptian Society
Comment: This book definitely deserves a 5! It addresses concerns which Egyptians, especially female Cairenes are unable to overtly discuss. It bluntly brings to the surface the day-to-day challenges that face women in correlation with society's unspoken traditional rules made by men.
Playing Cards in Cairo is a true outlook of real encouters of many families - Hugh Miles has done an excellent piece of work once again; this time by integrating a more personal experience making it more real for the reader.
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