A welcome book for Achebe’s many admirers, as well as for all students of contemporary African cultures.
Bookish lectures in which the Nigerian Nobel Prize–winning novelist reflects on his life and work.
Achebe (Hopes and Impediments, 1989) is the renowned author of Things Fall Apart, the most widely read novel ever to come out of Africa. Here, in three lectures given in 1998 at Harvard, Achebe draws on his recollections of childhood and youth to describe the origins of that 1958 book, as well as of the Nigerian independence movement that was reaching its full flowering in the late ’50s. At several points Achebe recalls an undergraduate class in which he and his fellow students read Joyce Cary’s novel Mister Johnson, which was set in Nigeria and full of white-man’s-burden tropes; when one of those students rose and informed the teacher that “the only moment he had enjoyed in the entire book was when the Nigerian hero, Johnson, was shot to death by his British master,” Achebe realized that he was witnessing the birth of a “landmark rebellion” (one in which Nigerians would press for their own sense of national identity) and of a literature destined to be filled with better heroes than the “embarrassing nitwit” Johnson. Achebe’s tour of English literature highlights the outrageous interpretations of African culture that much of it contains (in books that depicted Africans as, in the words of one white author, “a people of beastly living, without a God, laws, religion”). Plainly as tired of multiculturalist appropriations of African cultures as of imperialist ones, Achebe urges his listeners to seek authentic voices, ones outside the confines of the imagined “universal civilization” of Europe and North America.
A welcome book for Achebe’s many admirers, as well as for all students of contemporary African cultures.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-513506-7
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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