Alexandria: City of Memory

Amazon.com Price: $37.00 (as of 15/04/2019 03:15 PST- Details)

Description

This book is a literary, social, and political portrait of Alexandria at a high point of its history. Drawing on diaries, letters, and interviews, Michael Haag recovers the lost life of the city, its cosmopolitan inhabitants, and its literary characters.
Located at the coast of Africa yet wealthy in historical associations with Western civilization, Alexandria was once home to an exotic number of people whose cosmopolitan families had long been rooted within the commerce and the culture of all the Mediterranean world.
Alexandria famously excited the imaginations of writers, and Haag folds intimate accounts of E. M. Forster, Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, and Lawrence Durrell into the story of its inhabitants. He recounts the city’s experience of the 2 world wars and explores the communities that gave Alexandria its unique flavor: the Greek, the Italian, and the Jewish. The book deftly harnesses the sexual and emotional charge of cosmopolitan life on this ordinary city, and highlights the social and political changes over the decades that in any case led to Nasser’s Egypt.


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