Beyond the Pyramids

‘To the western mind’, writes Douglas Kennedy, ‘Egypt has always been a land apart — the cradle of history and human culture, as one guidebook put it — filled with the symbolic left-behinds of one of civilization’s first big trial runs...

But what about the modern state lurking behind this mythic realm? While countless travel chronicles have been written about Egypt the Immortal, few writers have ever undertaken journey through the contemporary Egyptian condition.’ In this clever, quirky and highly original travel book, Douglas Kennedy takes us on such a journey as he loiters with intent in modern Egypt. Sidestepping the usual assortment of pyramids, Ptolemaic temples and other ancient debris, he instead finds himself encountering an Egypt far removed from the common ‘archaeological theme park’ image — an Egypt where Bedouin watch American television in an oasis on the edge of nowhere...where monks in a desert cloister know a thing or two about word processors... where an entire community of Cairo's poor have set up residence in a cemetery… and where a young law student can simultaneously express his devotion to the word of Allah and to the songs of Michael Jackson. He discovers an Egypt delicately balanced between a multitude of conflicting identities; a major Arab nation struggling to find its way in the late twentieth century, while attempting to keep the gathering forces of Islamic fundamentalism at bay. Beyond the Pyramids is a dazzling chronicle of travels through a landscape strewn with incongruities; a landscape peopled by a vivid supporting cast of intriguing characters, whose stories all form part of Kennedy's pungently funny, compulsively entertaining, yet ultimately serious portrait of Egypt today.