Nasser's Republic: The Making of Modern Egypt

Speaking to relatives, diplomats, and common citizens with cherished memories, filmmaker Michal Goldman skillfully and clearly explains for 21st-century viewers—who are perhaps better acquainted with the “Arab Spring” and Mideast turmoil—the remarkable but flawed career of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970). The charismatic and often progressive (yet also autocratic, dictatorial, and sometimes short-sighted) Nasser was the foremost member of a cadre of close-knit “Free Officers” (including successor Anwar Sadat) in the Egyptian military, who took control of the country after peacefully ousting a declining Egyptian royal family in 1952. But it was the regime's seizure of the Suez Canal and purging the nation of the British colonial presence that boosted Nasser's personal popularity to regional icon. Nasser played the Cold War rivalry between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. against each other to benefit Egypt's modernization and even forged a single nation out of Egypt and Syria—an arrangement that eventually crumbled, making an especially poignant forecast of the Syrian disaster today. With Egypt's humiliating defeat by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, Nasser stepped down, dying of a heart attack a few years later at the age of 52. Nasser is still revered, although he never attained the true democracy that Egyptians continue to crave. Presented in both the full-length version and a 56-minute abridged edition, this fine historical profile is recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)