Word: mankinde
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Albanian rulers of Egypt and overlords of the Ottoman Empire did little else to benefit mankind, they were identified with some of the most beautiful women in the world. Princess Fawzia, sister of Egypt's fat Farouk and onetime Empress of Iran, was one. Dark-eyed Princess Zehra Hanzade, granddaughter of Turkey's last Sultan and mother of Fazilet, was another. Fazilet's father, Prince Mohammed Ali, is a cousin of Farouk's. He fled Egypt when Farouk did, and got most of his vast wealth out to Europe. At first, Papa was not keen...
...principal purposes. Men continued, in Catholic as much as in Protestant countries, to lie and steal, seduce maidens and sell offices, kill and make war. But the morals of the clergy improved, and the wild freedom of Renaissance Italy was tamed to a decent conformity with the pretensions of mankind . . . All in all, it was an astonishing recovery, one of the most brilliant products of the Protestant Reformation...
...wounded succeeds in kidnaping her. After the partisans' doctor dies in her care, they offer her a grim choice: help us or follow him. The decision tears Helga in two, not because she fears execution, but because she must measure her narrow patriotism against her involvement in all mankind, her diminution by any man's death. "I always believed," a partisan chief (Bernhard Wicki) tells her, "that to a doctor, wounded enemies are also human beings." Placing humanity before country, Helga sets to work with all her strength. But her lifesaving chores bring her no sense of exaltation...
...midday sun sears her still form, lying quietly in the dust. She is herself a fallen bridge between mankind's sundered parts. For a moment, before the small arms shatter the brief truce, Helga Reinbeck's silence is louder than all the guns...
This extraordinary novel is a sensuous and beautifully written hymn to the "postcoital sadness" of mankind. The heroine, Justine, a slum-born Jewess of great beauty, marries Nessim, a Coptic millionaire, who suffers her infidelities in silence. Nearly every male in the book and at least one female have a try at "awakening" Justine, but she is the sort of woman "who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self-because she does not know where to find...