A Taste for Oppression: A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus

is praiseworthy (Chapter 12), as she demonstrates how aloof policy-makers and regional experts were in terms of addressing and acknowledging the needs and political rights of youth in the MENA region (UN 2016). A minor though noticeable editorial lapse can be found in two separate case studies in which the author confusingly uses the same pseudonym (‘‘Dina’’) for two different female youth studying at university. Similarly, Educating Egypt outlines the highly competitive nature of university entrance examinations and the resultant obsession with grades among students, families, and broader segments of society (e.g., the mass media). However, to avoid the reader interpreting this as a solely Egyptian or MENA phenomenon, Herrera could have alluded to similar obsessions with grades and high-stakes examinations found in neighboring and far-flung societies such as South Korea and Japan. Shadow education plays a major role in many societies, with families in South Korea (for instance) allocating approximately ten percent of their budgets to private tutoring and after-school lessons. The current transformations taking place in the Egyptian education system belie the widespread dependence on so-called shadow education across almost all socioeconomic strata of society.