Overview
If you've ever studied a foreign language, you know what happens when you first truly and clearly communicate with another person. As Zora O'Neill recalls, you feel like a magician. If that foreign language is Arabic, you just might feel like a wizard. They say that Arabic takes seven years to learn and a lifetime to master. O'Neill had put in her time. Steeped in grammar tomes and out-dated textbooks, she faced an increasing certainty that she was not only failing to master Arabic, but also driving herself crazy. She took a decade-long hiatus, but couldn't shake her fascination with the language or the cultures it had opened up to her. So she decided to jump back in-this time with a new approach. Join O'Neill for a grand tour through the Middle East. You will laugh with her in Egypt, delight in the stories she passes on from the United Arab Emirates, and find yourself transformed by her experiences in Lebanon and Morocco. She's packed her dictionaries, her unsinkable sense of humor, and her talent for making fast friends of strangers. From quiet, bougainvillea-lined streets to the lively buzz of crowded medinas, from families' homes to local hotspots, she brings a part of the world that is thousands of miles away right to your door. A natural storyteller with an eye for the deeply absurd and the deeply human, Zora O'Neill explores the indelible links between culture and communication. A powerful testament to the dynamism of language, All Strangers Are Kin reminds us that learning another tongue leaves you rich with so much more than words.
Full Product Details
Author: Zora O'Neill
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Imprint: The American University in Cairo Press
ISBN: 9789774168659
ISBN 10: 9774168658
Pages: 344
Publication Date: 07 March 2018
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.
Reviews
Zora O'Neill is a wonderful writer, a hakawati who can spin a tale with the best of them. --Rabih Alameddine, author of The Hakawati and An Unnecessary Woman Zora O'Neill is the perfect travel companion: smart, curious, witty and knowledgeable. In a time when the news out of the Middle East is too often grim, she finds warmth and humor. By refusing to tread along the same paths that so many news reporters are confined to, she reveals to us rich new possibilities for understandingall in a deceptively breezy tone. --Carla Power, author of National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize Finalist O'Neill masterfully weaves together vignettes, linguistic musings, and a colorful cast of thousands into an always-thoughtful, often hysterically funny paean to a part of the world about which most Americans remain woefully ignorant. --Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found Wry, witty, and charmingly erudite, this lovely book goes through the looking glass of the Arabic language and emerges with a radiant image of the Arab world. --Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Life Without a Recipe, Crescent, The Language of Baklava, and others You will travel through countries and across centuries, meeting professors and poets, revolutionaries, nomads, and nerds. O'Neill's generous storytelling makes the intricacies of Arabic grammar seem fascinating and inexplicably glamorous. And the most unforgettable character you encounter may be the Arabic language itself, which will feel like an old friend by the time you finish this warm and hilarious book. --Annia Ciezadlo, author of Day of Honey This charming memoir . . . is sure to bring a nod of recognition to any student of Arabic, however uncomfortably he or she ever sat in that classroom, as well as to enthrall those never-students curious about the world's fifth-most-spoken language. --Louis Werner, AramcoWorld O'Neill doesn't teach readers to be fluent in Arabic, but she imparts a more valuable lesson on how (and how not) to learn a language, and the journey is more fascinating than the result. --Publishers Weekly
Author Information
Zora O'Neill is a freelance travel and food writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and Conde Nast Traveler, and she has written or contributed to more than a dozen titles for Rough Guides, Lonely Planet, and Moon. She lives in Queens, New York. www.rovinggastronome.com
