See Ouarzazate and Die: Travels Through Morocco [Paperback]

Sylvia Kennedy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1995

A first-hand view of life in Morocco, told by Sylvia Kennedy who travelled the country by local bus and mule.

Product Details

• Paperback: 342 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown & Co (P) (April 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316489239
• ISBN-13: 978-0316489232
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,842,500 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Inaccurate, offensive, and colonialist, June 10, 2010

By 

A. Garcia (Maryland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: See Ouarzazate and Die: Travels Through Morocco (Paperback)

As an American who lived in rural Morocco for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I have to take issue with Ms. Kennedy's perception of the country. Far from the friendly, warm, enticing land I lived in for so long, she sees only a hostile, foreign, suspicious police state. I don't want to gloss over the unfortunate realities of Morocco, like the poverty and the overbearing nature of the gendarmes, but I fail to see how her experience there was so uniformly negative unless she was approaching it with a healthy dose of preconceived notions.
Ms. Kennedy likes to refer to herself throughout the book as acting outside the locals' comprehension, behaving in such a bizarre (she'd say independent) manner that the Moroccans she meets think she's crazy. I think they're probably right about her. I met many people like Ms. Kennedy in Morocco--expatriates who came to the country without learning anything other than a few words of French, expecting the country to conform to their ideals of comfort, and the people to their ideas of Western civility and "proper" behavior. Not only did they offend everyone around them for being so culturally tone-deaf, but they garnered reputations quickly as screwballs and egotists. From the tone of the narrative, I suspect that Ms. Kennedy arrived expecting an entertaining, exotic experience, and didn't respond well to the reality of life in a poor North African kingdom. Rather than appreciating the many gifts Morocco has to offer, she focused entirely on the negative.
Whether she alienated all the Moroccans she met prior to or after her frustration with the country is difficult to assess.

1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding travel book, June 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: See Ouarzazate and Die: Travels Through Morocco (Paperback)

This is the most entertaining book about Morocco ever written