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Learn to COOK - Crescent
![Crescent]()
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List Price: $34.95
Our Price: $9.06
Your Save: $ 25.89 ( 74% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Amazon Remainders Account
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Audio Cassette
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Amazon Remainders Account
Manufacturer: Amazon Remainders Account
Number Of Items: 6
Number Of Pages: 540
Publication Date: 2003-05-12
Publisher: Amazon Remainders Account
Studio: Amazon Remainders Account
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Editorial Reviews:
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An Arab-American novel as delicious as Like Water for Chocolate. Praised by critics from The New Yorker to USA Today for her first novel, Arabian Jazz ("an oracular tale that unfurls like gossamer"), Diana Abu-Jaber weaves with spellbinding magic a multidimensional love story set in the Arab-American community of Los Angeles. Thirty-nine-year-old Sirine, never married, lives with a devoted Iraqi-immigrant uncle and an adoring dog named King Babar. She works as a chef in a Lebanese restaurant, her passions aroused only by the preparation of food—until an unbearably handsome Arabic literature professor starts dropping by for a little home cooking. Falling in love brings Sirene's whole heart to a boil—stirring up memories of her parents and questions about her identity as an Arab American. Written in a lush, lyrical style reminiscent of The God of Small Things, infused with the flavors and scents of Middle Eastern food, and spiced with history and fable, Crescent is a sensuous love story and a gripping tale of risk and commitment.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Mixed feelings
Comment: Abu-Jabar's writing is beautiful with its poeticism, richness, and vivid imagery. A story line dealing with Arab-Americans that treats the subject with humanity and complexity is essential in today's world of suspicion and distrust of the Arab world. That being said, I'm having a hard time finishing this book. I think that the story line moves a little slow for me. Maybe I'm just not into the love story genre. Overall, I would recommend to give this book a chance for the good things that it does have going for it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Ride on a Magic Carpet
Comment: Reading Diana Abu-Jaber's novel, Crescent, we can fly with her on a magical carpet to Iraq and Jordan. Fly to a fairytale world of minarets and domed mosques, we can taste rich baklava with her and savor the sweet fragrance of mint tea in a Bedouin's tent, counter pointed by exploding Iranian missiles in 1990's Bagdad. Diana is the daughter of an Irish Catholic mother and a dominant Arab-Jordanian father, she spoke of what it meant to grow up Arab in America. A tale lyrically told illuminating for us the minds of people of the Midle East.
Customer Rating:
Summary: No
Comment: All four thumbs, including those on my prehensile feet, down. Seven hundred or thousand pages about an illiterate goober with the hots for a nice guy. Played-out insights on immigrant life. Deployment of the most aggravating Arabic literary conventions. If you didn't want to bomb them before, you will after this. Even the recipes, so relentlessly an articulation device in the plot for the aforementioned goober, aren't good enough.
For them, go check out the Empress Claudia Roden, and the magnificent, irreplacable, mind boggling, Edda Servi Machlin.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Longing for the Middle East
Comment: Crescent
This is the story of Sirine, half Iraqi-half American, who works in a Lebanese Cafe in Los Angeles. Still single at 40, Sirine lives with her uncle, enjoys her fullfilling work as a Chef, and is the centre of attraction for men coming to the cafes, attracted by her middle eastern dishes which remind them of home and her mysterious ways. In a setting of homesickness, love for a lost country and longing for the middle east, Abu Jaber weaves a slow tale of love, woes and food. Sirine meets mysterious Han, Aziz and Nathan, all haunted in some way or another by Iraq and Sirine. This is quite a slow story which I thought could have benefited from deeper character development, especially for Sirine, but the whole Middle Eastern setting I thought was beautifully recreated. This is a great book for anyone interested especially in Iraqi culture.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Read this book
Comment: This is the best I've read in the last couple of years. The main character is a cook (I hate cooking). It's set in L.A. (I mostly read books set in London). But the story is beautiful, at times heart breaking. It's rare that a book can make me sob, but this one did. Not in a cheap way, where you feel manipulated by the author, but because I was so involved with the characters. I would recommend this book to just about anyone.
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