The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (P.S.)

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (P.S.)
by Lucette Lagnado

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (P.S.)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Lucette Lagnado
Edition: Kindle Edition
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Kindle eBook
Published: 2009-10-13
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 356
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books

Book Reviews of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (P.S.)

Book Review: Home, finally, and again
Summary: 4 Stars

This is a decent book in all respects. The author was born to an Egyptian Jewish family. They lived in relative peace prior to Farouk's coup, after which Nasser (described as a modern pharoah)took over and made life a little tough for those he considered "foreigners". The book is filled with some interesting facts about Egypt, which the author prefers to call "the Levant". For example, I had not known that Germany had advanced so further south during WWII to even cause a flurry in Egypt. Her father was a businessman of sorts, a Cairene "boulevardier", and Lagnado gives a vivid description of life in their household. The Egypt of this time has a thriving Jewish community living peacefully with their Arab neighbors. Lagnado paints a fair picture of Egypt in the 40's and beyond.

As life changes and as companies and businesses are nationalized under Nasser, the Lagnados find themselves in an exodus first to France, then later on to the US. Life does not prove to be easy in either of those nations. More than the exodus itself, the migrant experience roused more sensibilities in me. At the end, she makes a trip back to her home in Egypt and describes a nation she once knew, and all the changes that have occurred in their absence.

All in all the book is a decent one, but Lagnado does tend to be condescending to those she doesn't feel particularly close to. The book could also have turned out better if it had been abridged a little bit. She describes her father as a "boulevardier" more than ten times in this book. Was that necessary?

Summary of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (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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