In working on my graduate thesis, this book proved to be the single most helpful book of the hundreds I looked at about Algeria. Lorcin carefully examines the way race and ethnicity were created by the French. Although she tends to overstate the pre-existing divisions between the Berber and Arab population prior to French occupation, her analysis clearly shows the colonial French tendency to group the world into good ethnic groups and bad ethnic groups. In this case the Berbers fit the first mold and the Arabs fit the latter in the French mindset.

I thought that for my huge research paper on Algeria, I would need a number of large, detailed books, but those are very difficult to find without having an understanding of the country. I got Let's Visit Algeria as a last resort, and was pleasantly surprised to find that reading it truly gave me a better understanding of the country's history and culture. I would recommend it for anyone researching anything about Algeria as an introduction to the culture.

Clancy-Smith brings to life North African history in this brilliantly written piece that is not over-burdened with statistics but instead conveys the intricacies of the Arab culture and leaves no surprise in the reader's mind as to why the Algerians did not want to be ruled by the French, men of a completly different culture.

My only regret in giving this book is a 10 is that I wish it would have dealt more with the colonial experience in Algiers, Oran and Constantine and with the life of the pied noirs. However, doing this most likely was not the intent of the author, therefore I cannot downgrade the book too much

John Talbot does a good job reviewing the reason why this war was fought. Algeria had been French since the early 1800s, and had a large settler population of one million. These one million settlers thought of themselves as French, whereas the other eight million people resident in Algeria thought of themselves as Algerians. Talbot describes the conflict between the FLN and the French Republic. Also described was the conflict of the OSS with the French and Algerians. Good review of the government program of all four governments of the Fourth Republic, and DeGalle's progress in resolving the Algerian crisis.
Talbot is a rather dry writer, so although this book was a good summary of the conflict, it was not a page turner.

As some reviewers have mentioned, this book presupposes you know a lot about Augustine before you read this. This assessment is correct--you do. Wills freqently stops in mid-discusssion to get into arguing with other translaters about whether a given word should be translated one way or the other. And if you don't know about Augustine's life (presumably true, if you're reading a biography), you have no idea why the author is making a big deal about each translation point. And they are numerous.

In addition, key facts that most biographers would introduce for the reader are skipped. For example, he refers to the Maximus the Usurper in his pages as if you should know who he is. Who Maximus is or why he is important is never explained. Other references to key players are left similarly unexplained.

Other parts that are suspicious. After a long explanation of the origins of the word 'confession' and its use in Augustine's time, Wills decides to call Augustine's most famous work not by its universal title "The Confessions" but "The Testimony." What is the point of renaming a book that is known by everyone under one name? Everytime he refers to the Testimony, you mentally correct it to the Confessions. This is a pointless distraction and it makes you suspicious of what other titles have been intenetionally retranslated to something no one would recognize.

Likewise, he gives the name Una to Augustine's mistress, even though there is no record this was her name.

Personally, I don't like this kind of self-created biography. I was expecting a book that would lay out Augustine's life, and at various points dip deeply into the theological debates and explain Augustine's views in the context of his times and also detail how they affected Catholic/Christian thinking after him. This is not that book. This is a treatise arguing for a different translation of Augustine; it's not a biography.

I wanted very much to like this book, and I did by the time I finished and reflected on it. Publication of a short biography of Augustine, an influential but little-known (to modern Americans) figure in Western history, was a great idea, and I'm pleased that Penguin took on the project.

Writing a biography of someone like Augustine is difficult -- little information is available other than Augustine's surviving writings. The successful biographer needs to ground the available information, and a critical rereading of previous biographies, in our current understanding of the state of society at that time. Garry Wills has pulled that off nicely.

Augustine lived in interesting times: Church doctrine was evolving while identifying heretical docrines (e.g., Donatists); the Roman Empire was effectively split in two, with the Western capital moved from Rome to Ravenna; and (mainly) Christianized "barbarian" groups were taking over large sections of the Western Empire (Alaric's Goths captured Rome during Augustine's lifetime, and Augustine died near the end of the Vandal conquest of Roman Africa). Wills successfully places Augustine's life in context of these important events.

Other Amazon reviewers have noted that this is not a good introductory volume. I disagree, as long as the reader has some knowledge of the historical period. Even in that case, however, the early sections of the book can drag -- e.g., with lengthy reinterpretations of specific Augustinian phrases. But how can one complain about an Augustine biography that (in the final pages, anyhow) manages to incorporate discussions of both Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" and Chesterton's "Secrets of Father Brown"?

I was prompted to read this book after reading E.L. Doctorow's novel, City of God. I wanted to learn more about Augustine to think further about the obvious allusion in Doctorow's title, and throughout his book. I had read Augustine before, and was not a total newcomer to his thought. But I need a refresher and something that would expand my limited understanding.

Wills's book is short, clearly written, and presents in an accessible form something of the nature of this complex person, thinker, and theologian. But the book is no mere introduction. It in many ways takes issue with other accounts of Augustine and presents him in a manner that shows why he is worthy of the attention of the modern reader, as he has been of readers throughout the ages.

Wills spends a lot of time arguing that the title "Confessions" for Augustine's most famous work is inappropriate and retitles it "Testimony". This point has been made many times before, but in the process Wills does teach us something about the book. The process is not merely a pedantic exercise. Wills also argues that Augustine was not a sexual libertine in his youth and, actually more importantly for the modern reader, that he was not anti-sexual in his old age. He presents a Christianity that does not despise the body (making the simple point that in Christianity God came to the earth in a body) and that seeks to use the body for God's purpose in humility and love. In fact, Wills presents Augustine as correcting the anti-physical bias of pagan ascetics of his day.

The texts I was interested in for my purposes were the Confessions("Testimony") and City of God. The first text is referred to repeatedly in the first half or so of the book and forms the basis for Wills' discussion of Augustine's life, conversion, and theology. The second book is summarized briefly late in the book, and I found it useful. Again, Wills argues agains an other-worldy interpretation of the City of God and finds Augustine willing to bring the City to earth in a world believers share with nonbelievers through an early form of toleration, through love, and through common purpose.

There is a good, if necesarily brief, description in the book of the closing days of the Roman Empire. This is in itself worth reading and I had known little about it.

I think somebody coming to Augustine for the first time could benefit from the book and be encouraged to think and learn more. I found it useful. I think Penguin is to be commended for its biographical series, making important lives accessible to modern readers in brief, but not superficial texts.

From start to finish a diatribe against the evil French who pandered photographs proporting to be of Algerian women to the decadent west in an unsuccessful attempt to subjugate the Algerian people by doing so.

The author was equally distainfull of what he aparently considered the non-human things pretending to be Algerian women who appeared in these old photographs.

He used a few of the worst quality of these postcards to prove his points, which were driven home with questionable references to psychology.

Of course these photographs were the pornography of the day but they can often be beautiful works of art in their own right.

What the author does not anywhere mention in this venemous discourse is who the models actually were, if not Algerian women. In fact, that is exactly what they were, no matter how they dressed.

The earlier ones were often of slaves. Most of the others were of young girls without the protection of family driven into prostitution. It is not the French who were responcible for this. It was the Algerians themselves. Though the author does not show it, there were often series of photographs taken of the same girls. It is obvious when viewing these series that many of these girls were having the times of their often short, tragic lives being photographed. Others show the dispair of social evil.

The author shows none of this.

This book isn't worth the paper its written on. Don't waste your money.

This is an excellent book. i use it in my postcolonial classes in college as a way of introducing colonialist discourse and the way women are used in colonialist representations. if you want to understand why the East is suspicious of the West, especially when it comes to women and gender as a whole, this book is a good starting point.

I strongly recommend "the colonial harem" for everyone interested in Orientalism, colonial and postcolonial literature, and the subaltern studies. In "the colonial harem," Malek Alloula reverses the camera and literally enables the readers to observe the observer and his "colonial gaze." As a final note, Barbara Harlow's introduction itself is worth reading alone for a better grasp of the complex issues that underlie the representation of the other. - Definitely worth buying!

Only in "The Rape of Nanking" have I read a tale of such remorseless killing. The author personally tortured, hung, and shot numerous people, and the disturbing thing about it was how casual he was in doing so. Considering that he fought the Nazis in WWII with the French resistance, it's surprising how much he seems to have become like them (and how much the French occupation of Algeria looked like the German occupation of France). As for the book as a whole, it's well written and provides an important perspective on the conflict given his key role in it. It also provides a little bit of historic background about how the French experience in Vietnam, the rise of Arab nationalism etc. helped fuel the conflict. But all in all it's a pretty distasteful book (and that's from a person who's read lots of war chronicles).

This book poses many questions. What does a nation do to fight an enemy that will indiscriminately kill innocent civilians (including women and children)? How do intelligence forces get the information they need to prevent further attacks? Do the ends justify the means? General Aussaresses attempts to answer these questions in this book and I think, does so very convincingly.

It's important to understand the context of the situation. French Algeria was a colony populated by a number of ethnicities. Many muslims were pro-French and wanted Algeria to remain a French department. In addition, you had a significant French colonial population, the Pieds Noirs (the black feet) that wanted Algeria to remain French. Additionally, there were groups that wanted independence - those willing to work within a political framework, and those willing to engage in terrorism.

Aussaresses and his methods (as described in the book) were successful in subduing the rebels. France voluntarily left Algeria. De Gualle made the decision to give Algeria its independence in 1962-- the French were not forced out. In fact, many elements of the French army mutinied against De Gualle as a result of his decision -- but that's a different story.

This book describes the means by which information was gathered and applied in order to combat a foe that was willing to bomb civilians, engage in what we now call terrorist acts, and could conceal themselves within the population. The methods included torture and summary executions. But these were not the only methods employed. What Aussaresses established was a process of intelligence gathering and the application of military and police resources to act on that information. He used torture in interrogations in order to gather information. Aussaresses used the information gathered from these interrogations to eliminate operatives, foil terrorist plots, and systematically dismantle the FLN. These methods succeeded.

I think there are tough lessons to be learned from this book. How are our intelligence and military forces fighting the war on terror gathering their information to prevent further attacks? Are America and its allies prepared to do what is necessary to protect our populations? Do the ends justify the means?

Those who consider the French to be wimps who have no idea of how to handle terrorism should read this book. General Paul Aussaressess will certainly make you reevaluate your opinion France and how its military handles difficult situations such as urban guerilla warfare and terrorism. General Aussaressess was placed in charge of destroying the FLN terrorist infrastructure in the Algerian capital during the critical 1956-57 period. As impossible as this assignment was, he succeeded in dramatically reducing urban attacks during his tenure for several reasons. First, he was not afraid to employ tough measures against his enemy, including torture, assassination, and summary execution. Second and more importantly, he developed a superb human intelligence network to tracks down and eliminate the FLN. Finally, General Aussaressess worked extremely hard to get inside his enemy's head to predict when and where that enemy would strike next. Whatever people think about Aussaressess's methodologies, he definitely comes across as a thoughtful warrior. Like a good detective, Aussaressess was a man who could think on his feet to solve problems. His experience demonstrates how one person can make a difference in a war against terrorism. I recommend this book to anyone struggling with intelligence and terrorism issues, from the police officer on the street to high-level officials in Washington.

Isabelle Eberhardt's collection of short stories is intriguing. It is a bit dark yet uses beautiful imagery, esp of the natural surroundings of the Algerian Desert (Sahara). However, be forewarned that most of these stories were put together after her untimely death, and may not all be her own. Only the last 2 can be confirmed as penned by her word for word.

Isabelle Eberhardt captures the oppressed spirit of the Islamic men within her description of the kif smokers holed up in a ramshackle shelter for the night. In this short story "The Oblivion Seekers" she paints a descriptive picture of the backward desert towns of Morocco and aptly draws a subtle metaphor between a captive falcon and the plight of the Arab men.
On a road to anywhere else is the town of Kenadsa in a desolate town with not even essential human comforts, here of all places, "where there is not even a café", Eberhardt discovers a kif den. The Islamic kif dens of the late 1800's were not unlike the crack houses of today; hidden away in unforgiving places, always in poor sanitary conditions. These places are the sanctuaries for the homeless, the lost, the spiritually bankrupt, the wanderers of our day. This one was similar at least with regards to décor. This particular kif den, despite it derelict location, was of higher quality than most. It was in a "partially ruined house behind the Mellah, a long hall lighted by a single eye in the ceiling of twisted and smoke blackened beams". Eberhardt's passage continues, "The walls are black, ribbed with light colored cracks that look like open wounds". Within this apparent squalor are collected together vagabonds, nomads, persons of dubious intent and questionable appearance for the purpose of smoking kif.
Among them, on a "rude perch of palm branches" is a falcon. The captive falcon is tethered to the makeshift perch by a string around one leg. When unencumbered, falcons spend their time surveying the land from the tall branches of mighty trees or soaring in the clouds, high over the desert cliffs, keeping dominion over their land. Surprisingly, a simple string keeps the falcon terrestrial and prevents him from living out his true destiny.
Just as the owner of the proud raptor goes untold in Eberhardt's story, the oppressor of the Islamic men is neither disclosed; only the oppressed condition in which they all find themselves is described. It could be the politics of the region, the occupation of the land by foreigners, or the poverty inflicted by the desert on all its inhabitants. Reason aside, even the "most highly educated" of Islam can succumb to the oppression of the spirit.
Gathered this evening in the den, among others, is a Moroccan poet, a wanderer in search of native legends; to keep alive he composes and recites verse. There is a Filali musician, rootless without family nor specific trade. There too, a Sudanese doctor who follows the caravans from Senegal to Timbuktu. All, men in search of a medicine to help them forget. To help them forget the futility of their existence - wandering from place to place with no good purpose. These men should be part of a thriving free culture, able to spread their talents to the ends of the Islamic world. The art, music and science are essential pinnings of the Islamic spirit. With a free spirit they wander to the horizons with purpose as surely they, or their predecessors, once did; free to dream and make real those dreams.
Eberhardt writes, "even in the darkest purlieu of Morocco's underworld such men can reach the magic horizon where they are free to build their dream-palaces of delight". The Islamic men are proud men, intelligent men, with dreams and aspirations of freedom and self-determination but their desires, just like the falcon, are restrained. They travel across the desert from country to country undeterred by political boarders. They live off the land - on what meagerness the desert will yield. Yet, a metaphorical string around their ankle binds them tight. The men of Islam can roam freely about the desert but it is their Islamic spirit that is tethered. Consequently, they pursue their dreams in the "clouds of narcotic smoke".

He was a marvelous writer who served up 5-star books like Judith Hearne, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, The Statement, and my favorite of all, An Answer From Limbo... among many others. So, I would not consider The Magician's Wife to be the best introduction to him.

If a reader is maybe terribly interested in the actual story of the subjugation and conquest of Algeria by France in 1857, this book may provide sort of a fictional backdrop to those events, but none of the main characters grabbed me as being admirable (which means nothing as concerning a review) or memorable (which DOES mean something as concerning a review). I will grant the author this: he made me loathe the religious chicanery of the fanatical patriot magician Lambert, and he made me sympathetic towards the Arab Muslims upon whom Lambert was attempting to foist his spiritual supremacy hooey! And since I see this as the author's intention in the story (strengthened by Lambert's wife Emmeline's later disillusionment in the cause) I give it the three stars.

But seriously though, if you only have room for ONE Brian Moore book in your vacation luggage... I say, "pick a book... any other book!"

'The Magician's Wife' is my first Brian Moore book, and I can say it is good, but I still have mixed feelings about it. He has a good style, and is a great storyteller, but somewhere in the middle I got lost --but found again in the end. I liked the way he mixed politic and religion -- and I've read he does it in many novels, so I'll probably read another of his books sooner or later.

I liked the first part best than the second. It was very interesting to learn the traditions in that court, but I have the feeling that most characters were human types rather than human beings. Anyway, his attention to details is one of the things that makes the reading interesting. The description of lucheons, parties and huntings are very interesting.

In my view, he lost the command of the narrative in the second part, when the story is set in Algeria. Local people again seem more human types, and the narrative got a bit confusing. Nevertheless, the climax of the novel is something very interesting, and that grabs your attention, and there is one twist in the end, that makes sense.

Emmeline, the magician's wife, is an interesting character --of course, the most well developed one in the novel--, and despite some flaws she is totally believable. So are her husband and Denieu, the two other important characters.

To sum up, this is an interesting book, but not recommended to everyone. And for me, I think I should try anothe Moore novel before deciding where I place him in my taste for books.

Anyone interested in the historical relationship between Algeria and France or between fundamentalist Muslims and Christians will find the story uniquely absorbing. The characters, however, seem created almost exclusively for the purpose of advancing the plot. We do not really get beyond the surface with the characters of Emmeline, or Lambert, or Deniau, and that limits the reader's involvement. More intriguing than any "beach book" you may read because of its subject matter, I'd have enjoyed it better if its characters were not so hollow.

This book consists of a series of conversations between the journalist Elisabeth Schemla and the Algerian feminist Khalida Messaoudi. The conversations are organized into chapters according to topic. It is most interesting for the general reader when Messaoudi is describing her childhood and education. Later chapters focusing on her political struggles require the reader to have extensive background knowledge of modern Algerian politics in order to make sense of them. The repeated use of abbreviations in the book tends to be rather annoying for readers who aren't familiar with Algerian politics. They are explained in a glossary at the end. If you want an insider's view of Algerian politics of 1980s and 1990s, you must read this book. If you are simply looking for tales of an ordinary woman's life (or even an extraordinary woman's life) in Algeria, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Born in 1958, a red-headed, highly-educated and fiercely secular Berber, Messaoudi has established herself as one of Algeria's bravest and most articulate speakers of truth. In a series of interviewers with a French journalist, capably translated into English, she presents a pungent, invaluable first-hand exposé of the Islamist challenge in her country. Its every-day texture imbues her account with a feel for living in an Islamist tyranny-such as the incident of a primary school teacher who requests students to bring in corks for a practical experiment. When the children oblige, it turns out there is no experiment-only a trap; the teacher asked for the corks to find out whose families drink wine, then he launched into a violent diatribe against their miscreant parents for not living by Islamic law. A freethinker from an early age (as a teenager, she decided against prostrating herself during prayers, instead adopting a yoga-style position), Messaoudi does not mince words. She despairs about the descent of Algeria into what she calls "fundamentalist barbarism" and aruges that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), Algeria's main Islamist organization, has "absolutely all the classic ingredients of totalitarian populist movements." Contrary to most Western analysts of Islam, she discerns an "Islamist International" along the lines of the Communist International. In a particularly powerful analogy, she states "The veil is our yellow star" (even if she does stretch the analogy too far in arguing that the FIS obsession with women is "exactly like" Hitler's obsession with Jews). Were the Islamists to take power, she fears they would "clear the country of all the people who really bother them," which she assumes will be a very large group indeed. Like many Algerians, Messaoudi blames the Islamist rise in large part on the purposeful scheming of the dictatorship that ruled the country from independence in 1962 until the crisis in 1992. She argues that many of its steps, from introducing the Arabic language in schools to not cracking down on FIS, eased the Islamists' path. Messaoudi has her foibles, to be sure, sympathizing with Saddam Husayn and asserting that Washington was "completely responsible" for Scuds falling on Tel Aviv. But she emerges from these pages as a highly attractive intellectual, a heroine made necessary by the horrors of her country's recent history.

Middle East Quarterly, June 1999

Written as a dialogue between journalist Elisabeth Schemla and feminist leader Khalida Messaoudi, this book details the heartbreak and the triumphs of being female in a country that has bowed down to the pressures of Islamic Fundamentalism. Messaoudi discusses her life in an intelligent, honest, and passionate manner as she details what it was like to grow up Algerian and female. She also explains the many players and political groups who have tried to control the direction of Algeria over the last thirty years. Most importantly, she brings to life the terrible reality of life in Algeria, where women have been betrayed and stripped of their rights as people by the government under the Family Code and then enslaved, terrorized, and murdered by the misogynistic enemies of that same government. Messaoudi also discusses the ongoing tension between the Berber culture and the Arab culture of Algeria and its effect on the problems there. This is the first book I have read, in English, that gives such a clear accounting of the political climate of Algeria and of the lives of women there.