To read SIPPING FROM THE NILE, Jean Naggar's lavish memoir of her Cairo childhood, is to be transported to another world, another time. This book is a document of the gorgeous, elaborate rituals of Naggar's Sephardic upbringing. It is series of exquisitely-remembered portraits of the people whose have lives braided into hers-- among them her father, whom she movingly memorializes for imparting to her a novelistic sense of the human world: "I listened, spellbound, to my father's rich store of anecdotes...I began to understand that adults had faults and foibles and were multidimensional, having relationships to each other and to the world that went far beyond their peripheral impact on my own life. I began to sense the existence of a glowing tapestry of humanity stretching out into the far distance behind me..." Most of all, SIPPING FROM THE NILE tells the story of a life marked by deep loss, but one marked so much the more by the continuity its author has created in her lived and written present, despite formidable obstacles. A beautiful book!