Rewinding a Nation

A technology that refused to stay quiet

Andrew Simon’s Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt is the rare scholarly work that hums with life. It starts with dust-coated cassette tapes in a Maadi kiosk and ends with a sweeping rethinking of how Egypt’s modern history can be heard, felt, and remixed. The book insists that the stories of ordinary people are not peripheral to histo…