A moving, beautifully told account of an ordinary, yet extraordinary, life in South Africa. With a few notable exceptions, most South African memoirs of the 19th and early 20th centuries record the life and doings only of whites. This is why McCord's oral history of the life of Katie Makanya is so welcome and valuable. Winner of the Johannesburg Sunday Times/Alan Paton Prize for Non-Fiction, it is a sensitive and penetrating portrait of a culture, a time, and a place rarely seen from the inside. Makanya was well into her 80s when she insisted that McCord—the daughter of physician James McCord, for whom Makanya worked for 35 years as an interpreter and assistant in the province of Natal—tape and write up her recollections. Makanya was born in the early 1870s in the Cape Province. She did well in school and could speak any number of languages, but her real gift was her voice. When the choir she sang in won a local competition, a promoter sent the group on a tour of England. They traveled around the country to great acclaim, singing even to Queen Victoria. Makanya stood out clearly from the rest, and the prospect of a celebrated career in Europe was dangled before her. But after more than two years abroad, she wanted to return to her own people and find a husband and have children. And so she hid away the jewels she'd been given, concealed her education, put on the humble clothes and attitude that whites would expect of her, and became a servant. Eventually she met a Zulu man, Ndeya, and, overcoming parental resistance (her mother's people, the Fingoes, had been chased off their land by the Zulus), married him. The Boer War was brewing, so the newlyweds retreated to Ndeya's home in Natal, where Makanya was hired by the new doctor from America, Jack McCord, as his assistant. With few interruptions, they would work together until they both retired. Makanya's story is emotionally compelling, resonantly detailed, and of extraordinary cultural significance. (11 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: March 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-471-17890-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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