Paleo Every Day: 120 Delicious and Nourishing Recipes for Energy and Good Health
9.5
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In Paleo Every Day, Pete Evans shares his favourite recipes for good health and vitality. Inspired...
Mediterranean Living: Stylish and Elegant or Close to Nature
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Imagine the Mediterranean, with stunning fields of lavender, crystal clear water and ancient gnarled...
Awix (3310 KP) rated The Hand of Night (1968) in Movies
May 29, 2020 (Updated May 30, 2020)
Admirably serious tone and the central metaphor is coherent, but the problem with a lot of these foreign-shot films is that all the money seems to have gone on plane tickets, and the photography is often primitive and flat (a bit like a travelogue from the Moroccan Tourist Board). The pace is also not all it could be. Some decent bits here and there but the drabness of the film and its lack of incident counts against it. A case of potential not being realised.
An Army At Dawn
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The liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is a story of courage and enduring...
The Moses Stone (Chris Bronson #2)
9.0
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AN ANCIENT CODE A clay tablet covered in ancient writing is found by an English couple in Morocco....
Near and Far: Recipes Inspired by Home and Travel
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New York Times bestselling author Heidi Swanson's approach to cooking-delicious, seasonal, healthy,...
Gender and Equality in Muslim Family Law: Justice and Ethics in the Islamic Legal Tradition
Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Kari Vogt
7.0
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Gender equality is a modern ideal, which has only recently, with the expansion of human rights and...
ClareR (5879 KP) rated The Country of Others in Books
Sep 19, 2021
Mathilde falls in love with, and marries, Amine Belhaj, a Moroccan stationed in Alsace. After the war, she sails to Morocco to live with Amine on his family farm. Life is so different to that in France, and Mathilde struggles to adapt. The French there shun her because of her husband, and Moroccans are suspicious of her because she’s French.
It’s a time of great upheaval in the 1950’s, as the Moroccans fight for independence from France, and life becomes increasingly dangerous for the Belhaj’s.
It’s a challenging life for Mathilde: she has to work hard, and Amine has a very fixed idea of a wife’s role. When she doesn’t stick to his rules, voices her opinions or disagrees, Amine beats her - he’s a violent man, scarred by the things that he saw and experienced in the war.
Mathilde does manage to insist that their daughter, Aicha, goes to a good French speaking school, and Aicha proves to be a good, diligent student - but the other girls at school are poisoned by their parents views: they’re very unkind and bully her.
There is a real feel for the heat and dust of Morocco. The contrasting cultures and religions of Christianity and Islam are shown, as well as the roles of women and how they are restricted in the light of their religions and it’s traditions. It looks at what it is to be a foreigner in a strange land; belonging, both in a country and a family; and the Moroccan struggle for independence from France.
This is going to be a trilogy, and I’m already fully invested in it - I can’t wait for the next book. Sam Taylor’s translation is perfect, and I hope that they’ll be translating the subsequent books as well.
Many thanks to The Pigeonhole for helping me (yet again!) with my NetGalley reading, and to Faber for my ebook copy through NetGalley.
Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements
Book
Exploring films made in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria from 1985 to 2009, Suzanne Gauch illustrates...