SOURCE: Booth, Marilyn. “Dramatic Monologue.” Women's Review of Books 20, no. 4 (January 2003): 11-12.

In the following review of Walking through Fire, Booth acknowledges the pivotal role that El Saadawi played in Middle Eastern feminism, but wishes that the author would have elaborated on other feminists in the regime and explained the impact of the various organizations she has founded or worked with.

In 1956, baby daughter in her arms, Nawal El Saadawi traveled from Cairo to her father's village, Kafr Tahla in the Nile Delta. Newly graduated from Cairo University Medical School, she welcomed a change of air and took a post running the government-built village clinic. “My stride on the earth was powerful, big like my village grandmother,” she exclaims in this second volume of her autobiography [Walking through Fire]. “I needed space, yearned for the smell of green fields, of mud ovens baking bread.”

El Saadawi has staked...