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A review by cindie
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Lucette Lagnado
3.0
I love long book titles. They aren’t good for search engine optimization, and maybe they aren’t fun to work with if you are designing book covers, but I just love them. Not sure why, but those colons in the middle just make me swoon.
The long title isn’t the reason I picked up Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World. I grabbed it because it was about an area of the world (and a people) that I don’t know much about, and I’m always looking to learn more. Considering the tumultuous goings-on in Egypt right now, I wanted to read about what life was like there in earlier in history (but not too early, I’ve learned enough about the pyramids).
Lucette Lagnado is a journalist by trade, and she knows her way around a sentence. Her book was captivating, reading more like fiction at times than as the very real saga of her parents exile from Egypt and France. She takes turns talking about her mother, her father, and the family as a unit, and for this reason, it was a little hard to follow the timeline every once in awhile. It didn’t make the book less enjoyable, but I did find myself on more than one occasion flipping back a few pages for clarification and firm dates.
The part of the book that I enjoyed the most was the relationship between the author and the man in the white sharkskin suit himself, her father. As someone that is lucky enough to have a good relationship with my immediate and extended family, I’m always interested in reading about family dynamics in different cultures or backgrounds. Lagnado (or “LouLou, her childhood nickname”) was close with her father and had a very different relationship with him than he did with his other children. She did a fantastic job at slowly uncovering those other relationships, learning about herself, her father and her siblings while she went. Writing about real people that are close to you, it could be easy to gloss over shortcomings or emphasize good traits; Lagnado balances the good and bad, taking the time to let her father as a character to develop in all dimensions.
When I looked up the author online, I saw that she had written a sequel of sorts to The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit that focuses on her mother’s childhood and background in the same way. I think that the speed with which I added The Arrogant Years to my to-read pile is the best endorsement I can give to Sharkskin. Memoirs about a stranger’s family can be very well-executed or not so much. Lagnado’s book falls firmly into the former camp.
(Note: This review is copied/pasted from my blog Nonfictionado.)
The long title isn’t the reason I picked up Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World. I grabbed it because it was about an area of the world (and a people) that I don’t know much about, and I’m always looking to learn more. Considering the tumultuous goings-on in Egypt right now, I wanted to read about what life was like there in earlier in history (but not too early, I’ve learned enough about the pyramids).
Lucette Lagnado is a journalist by trade, and she knows her way around a sentence. Her book was captivating, reading more like fiction at times than as the very real saga of her parents exile from Egypt and France. She takes turns talking about her mother, her father, and the family as a unit, and for this reason, it was a little hard to follow the timeline every once in awhile. It didn’t make the book less enjoyable, but I did find myself on more than one occasion flipping back a few pages for clarification and firm dates.
The part of the book that I enjoyed the most was the relationship between the author and the man in the white sharkskin suit himself, her father. As someone that is lucky enough to have a good relationship with my immediate and extended family, I’m always interested in reading about family dynamics in different cultures or backgrounds. Lagnado (or “LouLou, her childhood nickname”) was close with her father and had a very different relationship with him than he did with his other children. She did a fantastic job at slowly uncovering those other relationships, learning about herself, her father and her siblings while she went. Writing about real people that are close to you, it could be easy to gloss over shortcomings or emphasize good traits; Lagnado balances the good and bad, taking the time to let her father as a character to develop in all dimensions.
When I looked up the author online, I saw that she had written a sequel of sorts to The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit that focuses on her mother’s childhood and background in the same way. I think that the speed with which I added The Arrogant Years to my to-read pile is the best endorsement I can give to Sharkskin. Memoirs about a stranger’s family can be very well-executed or not so much. Lagnado’s book falls firmly into the former camp.
(Note: This review is copied/pasted from my blog Nonfictionado.)