The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World

Author - Lucette Lagnado ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from Ecco was reviewed on 10-Dec-2008.

Search ISBN:0060822120 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World Reference Book. Classifications : General AAS Social Sciences New & Used Textbooks Custom Stores Specialty Stores Books General AAS New & Used Textbooks Custom Stores Specialty Stores Books General AAS Qualifying Textbooks Custom Stor . Click the following link to view the cover of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World.

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1) Hardcover Book The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Ecco. I enjoyed this book but wish the author had toned her Oedipal romanticism concerning her father and his playboy lifestyle during the years when they lived in Cairo. Glamorizing his adulterous and selfish behavior during the early years of his marriage was overdone. That part of the book would have benefitted from judicious editing. There is too much repetition, especially about the rumor that he had once had an affair with a popular Egyptian entertainer.The daughter is obviously imagining a father; this part gets out-of-control. Once the family leaves Nasser´s Egypt and the father turns his affections towards the narrator,his daughter, the story takes on a new honesty and from there on through their years in New York, the book is totally absorbing and quite believable. I have read many immigrant sagas and this is one of the best.¤

2) Hardcover Book The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Ecco. I could barely put this book down. Not only are the events of the author´s life interesting, but the details and descriptions are so breathtaking, emotionally real; I learned to much about a country I find fascinating, but also about a peoples who though "oriental" Jews, are of the same ethnic background of myself, a child of Ashkenazi Jews. So much of the story, though different than mine, appeals to the human side of life, my life anyway. You find yourself loving these people, knowing them, understanding them, feeling for them. The final chapters caused me to cry. This is one of my favorite books, and I will purchase it! I´ve already recommend this book to several Egyptian Muslim friends, to Jewish friends (some of whom, like myself, harken from Brooklyn).¤

3) Hardcover Book The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Ecco. A very moving real story, typical and representative of new immigrants experience. I learned a lot about the life of Jews in Egypt. Highly recommended.¤

4) Hardcover Book The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Ecco. This book is a very compelling read. It mostly told through the eyes of a child living through her families heart wrenching need to leave their home that they loved. They lived in Cairo when Jews were only tolerated there. But due to the father´s smarts and savy they were able to live well and enjoy the best possible life in Cairo. You learn all about their family trials and tribulations. The family relationships and tolerance in this story are very captivating. I do not wish to spoil this story for anyone that would like to read this memoir. This is a must read.¤

5) Hardcover Book The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Ecco. This is a well written book. It is a family history, portrayed through the eyes of a litle girl who ages as the story progresses. She worships her father--the Man in the White Sharkskin Suit--, yet is not blind to his lapses and frailties as a human being.

Every family has a history, and a cast of characters. The tragic relative; the family member who died young, the braggart, the ne´er do well, the one about whom we do not speak, the patriarch, the rich uncle, the apostate--all comprise our individual families. We all have a story, but here the author makes hers come alive. It is easy to visualize her family´s migration and trials as a screenplay or movie.

We learn about the author´s parents´ post-war courtship in Cairo, and the relative prosperity and freedom they enjoyed in the country ruled by King Farouk. We see the upheaval following the Suez Crisis and Nassar´s ascendency, and the family´s reaction and adaptation. We are witnesses to their daily triumphs and tragedies in the face of rising anti-semitism. Leon´s reliance on his faith, his wife´s coping skills and issues of illness, and death.

This is one family´s journey from Cairo to Paris to Brooklyn, the constancy of their faith and culture and the rise and fall of their fortunes. It is a human story. The locale may change, but it is a story that is part of all of us.¤

6) Hardcover Book The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Ecco.

In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado re-creates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years between World War II and Gamal Abdel Nasser´s rise to power. Her father, Leon, was a boulevardier who conducted business on the elegant terrace of Shepheard´s Hotel, and later, in the cozy, dark bar of the Nile Hilton, dressed in his signature white sharkskin suit. But with the fall of King Farouk and Nasser´s nationalization of Egyptian industry, Leon and his family lose everything. As streets are renamed, neighborhoods of their fellow Jews disbanded, and the city purged of all foreign influence, the Lagnados, too, must make their escape. With all of their belongings packed into twenty-six suitcases, their jewels and gold coins hidden in sealed tins of marmalade, Leon and his family depart for any land that will take them. The poverty and hardships they encounter in their flight from Cairo to Paris to New York are strikingly juxta-posed against the beauty and comforts of the lives they left behind.

An inversion of the American dream set against the stunning portraits of three world cities, Lucette Lagnado´s memoir offers a grand and sweeping story of faith, tradition, tragedy, and triumph.

Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and hailed by the New York Times Book Review as a "brilliant, crushing book" and the New Yorker as a memoir of ruin "told without melodrama by its youngest survivor," The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit recounts the exile of the author´s Jewish Egyptian family from Cairo in 1963 and her father´s heroic and tragic struggle to survive his "riches to rags" trajectory.

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 7-Jan-2009, 00608221209780060822125, 200-190-060-040-6X0-1X0-110-930-ZAB-8

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