Circling the Square

What happened to the promise of Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring? On January 25, 2011, the world was watching Cairo. Egyptians of every stripe came together in Tahrir Square to protest Hosni Mubarak's three decades of brutal rule. After many hopeful, turbulent years, however, Egypt seems to be back where it began, with another strongman, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in power. How did this happen? In Circling the Square , Wendell Steavenson uses literary reportage to describe the intimate iro