Zaat

For my next reading assignment I chose to read Zaat by Sonallah Ibraham. This book was highly recommended by a former presenter in our class so I thought I would check it out. Unfortunately I found this one of the hardest books to read. Zaat is an average woman in Egypt who is in an arranged marriage. The book talks about the corruption in Egypt, but it jumps around a lot and the book is kind of hard to follow. The chapters alter between reading about Zaat and her life and different excerpts from the newspaper she works for and articles that are printed in the paper about the corruption in Egypt and it's government.
The story doesn't flow, but jumps from event to event with very little information. There is one part in the story that did talk a little more in depth. Zaat is diagnosed with breast cancer, but the way she was diagnosed was very sketchy at best. She is told she needs surgery to have them removed, but after discussing this with her husband she decides against the surgery. Being a survivor myself this part kind of lost me. There are so many things wrong with this part of the book that I'm not sure where to begin.
After reading this section of the book I completely lost interest in the book and really had to push myself to finish it. The book does have a few good points in it with dry humor, but overall I did not enjoy this book at all.

Turkey

Last week while I was out sick we had a guest speaker who talked about Turkey. I'm not very familiar with the history of Turkey, but I did find a couple nice web sites about the country. Turkey is the home of the Ottoman Empire and the first capital was Bursa.
Unfortunately I found more web sites on how to cook a turkey than I did on the country of Turkey.


This is a web site that talks about the history of Turkey during the Ottoman Empire.
http://www.kultur.gov.tr/EN/BelgeGoster.aspx?17A16AE30572D313E603BF9486D4371D56573D7CD94618A3

This web site talks about the dress of the women during the Ottoman Empire. There were several types of dress for women in this time period. This web site even talks about the dress for non-muslim women in the capital city of Bursa.
http://www.kultur.gov.tr/EN/BelgeGoster.aspx?17A16AE30572D31371BE64510F6C8BC92E327A7616BC3132

This web site tells about the different sultans in the Ottoman Empire which I thought was pretty cool to see.
http://www.kultur.gov.tr/EN/BelgeGoster.aspx?17A16AE30572D313A79D6F5E6C1B43FF1ABB7EB6D1B95756