PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"...[a] sweeping and authoritative history ... Ghattas’s narrative upends this Western misconception. Instead of feuding over theology, Ghattas shows, Saudi Arabia and Iran transformed latent religious divisions into weapons wielded in the pursuit of political power ... Ghattas tells many of these stories through the eyes of myriad individual men and often women who spoke out in one way or another against the post-1979 conservative turn in the region.\
Peter Hessler
PositiveLiterary Review... both beautiful and heartbreaking ... 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. One remarkable chapter weaves together the stories of a Jewish family fleeing Cairo in the 1950s and a gay Muslim fleeing the city today. It all comes together, but you have to read it to believe it. 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 ... Hessler renders each of them with empathy, respect and affection ... Hessler’s digressions into Egyptology, however, feel much less natural ... and I question many of his generalizations ... It will be up to Egyptians to decide what went wrong and how they can fix it.
