The Buried by Peter Hessler

The Buried by Peter Hessler

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

Extraordinary...Sensitive and perceptive, Mr. Hessler is a superb literary archaeologist, one who handles what he sees with a bit of wonder that he gets to watch the history of this grand city unfold, one day at a time. --Wall Street Journal

From the acclaimed author of River Town and Oracle Bones, an intimate excavation of life in one of the world's oldest civilizations at a time of convulsive change

Drawn by a fascination with Egypt's rich history and culture, Peter Hessler moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. He wanted to learn Arabic, explore Cairo's neighborhoods, and visit the legendary archaeological digs of Upper Egypt. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker, friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring had begun, and now the country was in chaos.

In the midst of the revolution, Hessler often traveled to digs at Amarna and Abydos, where locals live beside the tombs of kings and courtiers, a landscape that they call simply al-Madfuna the Buried. He and his wife set out to master Arabic, striking up a friendship with their instructor, a cynical political sophisticate. They also befriended Peter's translator, a gay man struggling to find happiness in Egypt's homophobic culture. A different kind of friendship was formed with the neighborhood garbage collector, an illiterate but highly perceptive man named Sayyid, whose access to the trash of Cairo would be its own kind of archaeological excavation. Hessler also met a family of Chinese small-business owners in the lingerie trade; their view of the country proved a bracing counterpoint to the West's conventional wisdom.

Through the lives of these and other ordinary people in a time of tragedy and heartache, and through connections between contemporary Egypt and its ancient past, Hessler creates an astonishing portrait of a country and its people. What emerges is a book of uncompromising intelligence and humanity--the story of a land in which a weak state has collapsed but its underlying society remains in many ways painfully the same. A worthy successor to works like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, The Buried bids fair to be recognized as one of the great books of our time.

Peter Hessler is a contributing writer for National Geographic and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he was the Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007. River Town, which won the Kiriyama Prize, Oracle Bones, which was a National Book Award finalist, and, most recently, Country Driving are among his works. He was designated a MacArthur Fellow in 2011 after winning the National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting in 2008. He is based in Cairo.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780525559566
ISBN 10	0525559566
Title	The Buried
Author	Peter Hessler
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published	2019-05-07
Number of pages	480
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.