by Lisa J. Shannon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
A highly personal and memorable story.
Shannon (A Thousand Sisters: My Journey into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman, 2010), an international human rights activist and founder of the nonprofit Run for Congo Women, tells the harrowing story of a Congolese family torn apart by the ongoing threat of Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army.
In her home of Portland, Oregon, the author regularly visited with her friend Francisca Thelin, a Congolese expatriate. Francisca confided tales about her safe, seemingly perfect African childhood growing up on her family’s coffee plantation, followed by the intrusion of the menacing, violent Lord’s Resistance Army. Having immigrated to the United States years before, Francisca lived well, though she was haunted by phone calls from her mother, Mama Koko, detailing the mounting dangers of life in Dungu. Over the course of a year, Mama Koko called nightly to recount the tragic news of the deaths of family members, friends and neighbors who were abducted, tortured and brutally killed by the LRA; some were even burned alive on Christmas Day. Together in 2012, Francisca and Shannon traveled to Africa to visit her family and see and hear for themselves the traumatic narratives of Mama Koko, her husband, Papa Alexander, and other relatives and locals desperate for their accounts to be heard. Shannon weaves together these nightmarish stories of survival and deep grief with the history of Mama Koko’s life before the LRA invaded. She also provides details of Papa Alexander’s wild, entertaining past and Francisca’s struggle to reconcile her happy girlhood memories with the reality of unrelenting threats and cruelty. Shannon’s book both offers a rich portrait of her subjects’ lives and serves as a call to action. The author closes with a section called “What You Can Do Before Setting This Book Down,” since “the damage and the structural issues in Congo’s broken government that have allowed the violence to persist will take decades to heal.”
A highly personal and memorable story.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1610394451
Page Count: 224
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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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
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by Reyna Grande ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 28, 2012
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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