Search results for ""Author Raphael Cohen""

There are few issues more divisive than what has become known as “the right to die.” One camp upholds “death with dignity,” regarding the terminally ill as autonomous beings capable of forming their own judgment on the timing and process of dying. The other camp advocates “sanctity of life,” regarding life as intrinsically valuable, and that should be sustained as long as possible. Is there a right answer?Raphael Cohen-Almagor takes a balanced approach in analyzing this emotionally charged debate, viewing the dispute from public policy and international perspectives. He offers an interdisciplinary, compelling study in medicine, law, religion, and ethics. It is a comprehensive look at the troubling question of whether physician-assisted suicide should be allowed. Cohen-Almagor delineates a distinction between active and passive euthanasia and discusses legal measures that have been invoked in the United States and abroad. He outlines reasons non-blood relatives should be given a role in deciding a patient’s last wishes. As he examines euthanasia policies in the Netherlands and the 1994 Oregon Death with Dignity Act, the author suggests amendments and finally makes a circumscribed plea for voluntary physician-assisted suicide.

Read more less

Abir scrapes a living in a Beirut hospital morgue by night, stealing from both the bodies he tends and his bosses. But he has a dark history that continues to haunt him. Earlier in the civil war, he fled his village for Beirut and, lost in the big city, joined a political party to survive. When he is kidnapped from the hospital, he knows he has not escaped his past and the many crimes he witnessed. But what or who is still chasing him?

Read more less

You are bored, bored, bored, stuck in a half-job, berated by your parents and unsure whether you should marry your cousin. You want to change. A chance encounter on Facebook leads you to Emmie and her underground world of strange fashion, drinking, dancing, sex, and drugs. You become an Emo and discover philosophical atheism and practical Satanism. Although Emmie’s rules include no sex and no love, you become addicted to her and the belief that she will be the one to change you. You fall in love. Your inability to disobey her leads you to embrace her creed. The efforts of your family to restore you to the fold fail, and your heroism leads her to succumb to you.One final act of ‘degeneracy’ too far leads you into the arms of the state’s torturers and to reaffirm society’s values, if with a greater sense of freedom and adventure.Status: Emo is a romp through the mind of the young Egypt. Written in 2010, it predicts revolt and hints at culture wars to come.

Read more less

Ahmed Morsi is a renowned painter as well as a prolific art critic, journalist, translator, and, as this book reveals to a new audience, a consummate poet, with his debut collection published at the age of 19. Poems of Alexandria and New York, Ahmed Morsi’s first volume in English translation, captures the modernity and empathy at the heart of all his works, his surrealistic humour, and his visions of the dramas of ordinary life. It comprises two of his best known collections, Pictures from the New York Album and Elegies to the Mediterranean, both written when he resumed writing poetry following a break of nearly 30 years after the calamitous Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War. The former opens up the city of New York, his home since the mid-1970s and where he still lives and works, while the latter takes readers deep into abiding memories of the Mediterranean city of his birth, Alexandria, Egypt.

Read more less

A chance encounter on a plane throws together Doha, a fashion designer unhappily married to a leading figure in the Mubarak regime, and Ashraf, an academic and leading dissident. The story of their relationship and Doha's self-discovery runs alongside a young Egyptian's search for the mother he never knew, and these intersecting narratives unfold against the background of political protests that culminate in the overthrow of the regime. A moving and at times humorous story, Butterfly Wings is an extended allegory of Egypt's modern experience of authoritarian rule and explores the fractures and challenges of a society at the moment of revolutionary transformation.

Read more less

Birds of Nabaa is a tale of physical and spiritual journeys, beginning in Nabaa, a remote Mauritanian village, whose herds lead the community according to their own inscrutable instincts, to life in Madrid, the Gulf states and Guinea, where the narrator's work as an embassy accountant takes him, and to Mauritania's capital Nouakchott. Inspired by the Sahara of his childhood and devoted from an early age to the vagabond life of the pre-Islamic poets, the narrator's constant life on the move in search of the inner stillness known only to desert dwellers leads him back always to the music, song and poetry so much a part of Mauritanian life and the spiritual universe of Sufism. The mix of diverse characters joining him includes Teresa, his Brazilian neighbour in Madrid whom he taught to make tea the Mauritanian way; Rajab the inspiring teacher in a blue face veil; Hussein the poet; Mariam, a postman between the living and the dead via cowrie shell readings; the exiled judge of Chinguetti; as well as his close friend the voracious reader and rebel Abdurrahman who wants to change the world, Abdel Hadi, the holy-fool sheikh with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Arab history and poetry, and Ould al-Taher, the first climate-change refugee. The narrator's travels take him to the village of Kanz al-Asrar near a tributary of the Senegal River, an area so fertile it is like a lush paradise. However, two and more years without any rain create drought, wells dry out, livelihoods shatter, and dreams turn to disturbing nightmarish premonitions of disaster. The burning fire of the sun is winning its eternal struggle with the hidden water that the clouds plant in the depths of the sand. As desertification takes hold, that paradise of southern Mauritania and of Nabaa gradually declines and the waves of migration, always a feature of life in the Sahara, intensify.

Read more less

Chapters from eight novels on IPAF longlists; Sudanese novelist Amir Tag Elsir writes Literary Influences; chapters from Goat Mountain, 30-year-old debut novel of Habib Selmi; “Arabic Literature in Russia” – essay by Russian Arabist Viktoria Zorytovskaya. Guest author is Spanish poet Angel Guinda. Plus a new Banipal Photo Album section.

Read more less

The Madness of Despair tells the story of Maliha, who is living in London with her husband Nafie after an arranged marriage in their distant Arab homeland. The couple become good friends with Doctor Nadim, a fellow exile, but in the twists and turns of the friendship, the men’s nostalgia for their old lives – and old ways of living – come into conflict with Maliha’s ambition to live and love freely and make something of her new life now she’s settled in London. Though ready to throw off the constraints of her disastrous marriage at the slightest turn, Maliha is ill-prepared for the fire of emotions that overcomes her, leading to unforeseen consequences for all three. It is a powerful narrative that reveals just how much psychological suffering and cultural displacement can upset the most ordinary of aspirations for life and love.

Read more less

The Madness of Despair tells the story of Maliha, who is living in London with her husband Nafie after an arranged marriage in their distant Arab homeland. The couple become good friends with Doctor Nadim, a fellow exile, but in the twists and turns of the friendship, the men’s nostalgia for their old lives – and old ways of living – come into conflict with Maliha’s ambition to live and love freely and make something of her new life now she’s settled in London. Though ready to throw off the constraints of her disastrous marriage at the slightest turn, Maliha is ill-prepared for the fire of emotions that overcomes her, leading to unforeseen consequences for all three. It is a powerful narrative that reveals just how much psychological suffering and cultural displacement can upset the most ordinary of aspirations for life and love.

Read more less