by Koigi Wa Wamwere ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2002
Nonetheless, a terrifying work of enormous importance that contrasts humanity with bestiality, dignity with depravity.
Human rights activist Wa Wamwere relates in harrowing detail the repeated incarcerations, tortures, and terrors inflicted upon him and his family by Kenya’s oppressive regimes.
This strange and powerful work mixes memoir, social history, polemic, and manifesto. Its basic structure is autobiographical, but Wa Wamwere frequently interrupts with Kenyan history, ethnography, folk tales, poetry, fables, parables, songs, and laments for lost friends and lost causes. We learn about his birth into an impoverished family. His father was a forest worker who labored long hours for a pittance. His mother struggled to keep her family safe and cohesive; she emerges here as a powerful woman who would not abandon the political causes of her sons, even in the face of prison and torture. Wa Wamwere’s childhood was difficult in school and out. He recalls teachers who beat him every day, and he endured the loss of a one-year-old sister who was inadvertently dropped into a pot of boiling porridge. He records his disillusion with Jomo Kenyatta, who transformed quickly from hero to horror, and his revulsion at the policies of David arap Moi, Kenyatta’s successor. Wa Wamwere attended Cornell in the early 1970s but returned to Kenya in 1973 and became involved in revolutionary politics. The next 30 years brought him small successes (he was elected to parliament) and unspeakable pain. For opposing Moi’s government, he was repeatedly arrested (usually without warrant), beaten, jailed, and otherwise humiliated and intimidated. His most recent release was in 1997. The author treads at times on Western toes: he blasts America for supporting African dictators, vigorously defends “female circumcision,” and lauds Qadaffi. Interested less in the quality than in the power of his prose, he frequently diminishes the latter by paying too little attention to the former; clichés pervade and sometimes spoil his text.
Nonetheless, a terrifying work of enormous importance that contrasts humanity with bestiality, dignity with depravity.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58322-521-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
Share your opinion of this book
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
Awards & Accolades
Likes
21
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
National Book Award Winner
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.