The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.)

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.)
by Lucette Lagnado

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.)
List Price: $14.99
Category: Book
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Book Summary Information

Author: Lucette Lagnado
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-07-01
ISBN: 006082218X
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Product features:

Book Reviews of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.)

Book Review: What Started As An Article, Should Have Remained One
Summary: 1 Stars

The Lagnados family, like thousands of other Jewish families, were basically forced to leave Egypt after Nasser became president. The plight of the Jews is a compelling story. The story of Loulou and her father isn't.
The author's father Leon was an insufferable man who, after leaving Cairo in 1963, longed to return to Egypt for the rest of his life. His greatest solace was his relationship to a prayer book, and to his daughter. How many times must we read how he held her hand as he limped, clearly in pain, or how he always turned to his tattered prayer book.
This was a tedious read. The author is an accomplished investigative reporter, but as a memoirist, she offers no insights nor reflections that make her story a compelling read.

Summary of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.)

Lucette Lagnado's father, Leon, is a successful Egyptian businessman and boulevardier who, dressed in his signature white sharkskin suit, makes deals and trades at Shepherd's Hotel and at the dark bar of the Nile Hilton. After the fall of King Farouk and the rise of the Nasser dictatorship, Leon loses everything and his family is forced to flee, abandoning a life once marked by beauty and luxury to plunge into hardship and poverty, as they take flight for any country that would have them.

A vivid, heartbreaking, and powerful inversion of the American dream, Lucette Lagnado's unforgettable memoir is a sweeping story of family, faith, tradition, tragedy, and triumph set against the stunning backdrop of Cairo, Paris, and New York.

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.

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