This section contains 820 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: “Out of the Dustbin of History,” in Washington Post Book World, Vol. XXII, No. 13, March 28, 1993, p. 6.
In the following positive review, Irwin compliments Ghosh's technique of comparing and contrasting present-day and twelfth-century Egypt in In an Antique Land.
About a quarter of the way in to this curious book [In an Antique Land] (a mixture of history, travelogue, social anthropology and personal memoir), Amitav Ghosh has occasion to remark that “it is not easy, after all, to see oneself sitting down to leaf through a collection of eight-hundred-year-old documents, written in a colloquial dialect of medieval Arabic, transcribed in the Hebrew script, and liberally strewn with Hebrew and Aramaic.” But that is what Ghosh did, and his account of the difficulties involved can be appreciated as treasurable understatement.
While still a student, Ghosh, an Indian who studies anthropology in Cambridge, became interested in the Geniza, a body...
This section contains 820 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) |