An inspiring story of a young man determined to excel and escape.
Kenyan writer and professor wa Thiong’o (English and Comparative Literature/Univ. of California, Irvine) offers a second harrowing volume of memoir, a sequel to his Dreams in a Time of War (2010).
The author begins in 1955, when he had just completed his first term of boarding school and returned home to find…no home. His village was destroyed, and his family was relocated. Right from the outset, then, the themes of dislocation, fear and random violence and terror emerge. His older brother sided with the anti-colonials and was eventually captured, then released; the author was imprisoned, not long after his graduation—a random detention that culminated in the 1959 trial that concludes this book. Wa Thiong’o highlights his family and friends, but also the dominant presence of the school principal, Edward Carey Francis, who appears as a strong, principled but enormously complex character whom the author both feared and revered. School became a revelation, as the author plunged into the library, reading indiscriminately at first (he loved Sherlock Holmes, was troubled by the literature of empire). Excelling in the classroom, he submitted a story for publication in the school journal (it was accepted), and he participated in the school’s annual Shakespeare production. The author also writes about his dawning spiritual and religious life (he became an extraordinarily devout Christian, then began to question) and about his ineptness at sports. He preferred table tennis and chess to soccer and field hockey. Throughout, he fittingly refers to school as his “sanctuary,” for the place shielded him from the Mau Mau Uprising and other regional and continental crises.
An inspiring story of a young man determined to excel and escape.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-90769-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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