A brief, genuine, heartfelt memoir of an awe-inspiring life.
A South African nurse’s memoir of how she escaped grinding poverty to become a beloved advocate for and caretaker of homeless children.
Ntleko grew up the youngest of 12 children in Harding, a tiny village in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa. When her mother died, relatives took in her youngest siblings while her older sisters married or found work. At age 6, she found herself alone to care for herself and her alcoholic father. Working as a laundress and, later, a field hand, and with no time to make friends her age, the author's main source of moral support came from an English missionary worker, who taught Ntleko the lesson that would become her life mantra: “if you want to be of help and service to others…get an education.” At 14, she began school, against the wishes of her tradition-bound father. Getting only a few hours of sleep each night, she worked tirelessly to make her dreams come true. She even ran away from home to earn the money her father could not give her to continue her studies. Ntleko was 28 when she graduated from high school and began her training as a nurse. Yet it was not until she adopted the first of many children a few years later that she realized her true calling was to help homeless youngsters. Ntleko tackled the challenges of single parenthood in the 1960s; more than a decade later, she found herself tackling the even greater challenge of the AIDS crisis. She eventually founded two organizations, Clouds of Hope and Kulungile, dedicated to providing shelter for children from AIDS-affected families. Ntleko’s story, which she tells in simple language, is inspiring and moving. She neither dwells on nor dramatizes the hardships she has faced, preferring instead to focus on “fill[ing] her hands with love and then spend[ing] all that love until [her] hands are empty again.”
A brief, genuine, heartfelt memoir of an awe-inspiring life.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1583949320
Page Count: 176
Publisher: North Atlantic
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
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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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