Customer Reviews

PARIS ALONG NILE (H)

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The beautiful photographs of the belle epoque buildings of Cairo fairly jump off the pages at you. This lovely, understated book should be a guide for architecture and restoration students and buffs. This is a great gift book for the right people.

From the Egyptian Press: "[Myntti's] photographs...overflow with her love of Cairo, so the photos have become more beautiful than professional photos, because it was the heart that recorded not the fixed lens that cannot feel the pulse." (Hussam Abd Rabbu, Akhir Saat.) "The French architecture of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries makes up one of the most charming of Cairo's harlequin faces.... This era has left a strikingly beautiful imprint on the citscape. Myntti's zoom lens offers a graceful catalogue." (Francis Bickmore, Egypt's Insight.) "In its global significance and cosmopolitan sophistication, Cairo was not merely a copy of Paris, it was more than Paris. The book inivtes one to 'promenade' and also to protect these neglected treasures." (Bruno Ronfard, Al-Ahram Hebdo.)

I bought this book because I wanted to have a look at old Cairo, this part of the city that has been unspoiled by time and, unfortunately, neglected by men. I think the Egyptian Government should do something to restore and exploit these buildings for the sake of Cairo's beauty. The pictures are nice and the texts are mainly for those who have an architectural interest for Cairo's past. I am not an architect, though, and I enjoyed the book - perhaps because I love this city very much.

Cairo has many parts...there is old Cairo...

There is Coptic Cairo which was built on the old Roman Fort...called Babylon on the Nile.

There is Old Fusat the original Islamic Settlement just north of the Roman Fort...

Then there was Islamic Cairo...which was built further to the north of old Cairo, but away from the banks of the Nile because the flooding was not yet fully controlled...

Then, last...after the floods were control...there was European Cairo, built in the 19th Century, as "Paris on the Nile," mainly with money acquired when the American Civil War caused cotton prices to soar...

This book pictures the new European Cairo...on the Banks of the Nile...a small place compared to Cairo as a whole...but the most accessible part of Cairo to the Western Tourist... The Cairo of Shepheard's Hotel, The Midans, the Egyqtian Museum, Fallukas and the Cornishe...