Detroit: Wayne State UP 2002 332 pp...

Detroit: Wayne State UP 2002 332 pp ISBN 0-8143-2755-9 $3995

Is it headstrong to enjoy death notices? Researching my last part I spent many hours in the Egyptian National Library happily riveted at obituaries published in nineteenth-century Arabic periodicals. Like Mushira Eid, I was penetrating to elicit the differences sex might make in the capsule renderings of a life now mourned. I rest obituaries in women's magazines to be an essential source as I traced the rhetoric of exemplary biography in and of women's lives.

Eid works onward the more familiar type of obituary: the