In a review titled “Hope’s Necropolis — The Buried: Life, Death and Revolution in Egypt” in the May issue of the UK’s Literary Review (“For People Who Devour Books”), David D. Kirkpatrick, who has written about Egypt in the past, writes:
Beautiful and heartbreaking. Readers of his books on China will know that Hessler has a genius for structuring a narrative. Here he has crafted a miraculously coherent arc out of several disparate themes: the political upheaval that accompanied the Arab Spring, the lives of a handful of ordinary Egyptians, and his own education in the language of contemporary Egypt and its ancient archaeology, to name just a few . . . Every page is vivid and engaging, and each chapter packs in surprises . . .The greatest contribution of The Buried to the shelf of English-language books on the Arab Spring is the intimately detailed depictions it provides of a handful of ordinary, politically disengaged Cairenes trying to steer their way through the chaos.
Peter Hessler‘s The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution was published this week by Penguin Press in North America, Profile Books in the United Kingdom, and Text Publishing in Australia and New Zealand.