In today’s issue of The Sydney Morning Herald, Founding director and spokesman for the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, and UNESCO chair in journalism and communication at the University of Queensland Peter Greste writes in his review titled “The Buried: Digging into the History of Egypt’s Recent Turbulence“:
There have been countless attempts to unpack what went wrong with the Arab Spring, so with its intriguing subtitle, "an archaeology of the Egyptian revolution", Peter Hessler’s book, The Buried suggested a refreshingly original take on the country’s modern history. ...One of the values of The Buried is the way that Hessler openly struggles to reconcile his Western view of the world with Egypt’s own special way of navigating history and politics. It is a battle almost every foreign correspondent faces but rarely acknowledges. ...The Buried is a book that promises a uniquely deep insight into modern Egypt, and what went so terribly wrong after the tumultuous, joyous eruptions of the Arab Spring. But the implied but never stated conclusion that Hessler invites the reader to make is rather more cliched than he probably ever intended: that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Peter Hessler‘s The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution is published by Penguin Press in North America, Profile Books in the United Kingdom, and Text Publishing in Australia and New Zealand.