"The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World," by Lucette Lagnado (HarperCollins, 352 pp.)
In this graceful memoir Lagnado, an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal, offers a portrait of Egyptian society at another moment of transition. In 1963, after the fall of King Farouk and the rise of the Nasser dictatorship, Lagnado's father, Leon, a successful Jewish Egyptian businessman, loses everything and he and his family are forced to flee their luxurious lives in Cairo. Lagnado's book succeeds in vividly recreating the Egypt she once knew.
