A celebrity autobiography with substance and political punch.
Before she walked a runway, the author walked for weeks to escape civil war.
The seventh of nine children born to a Dinka family, Wek was eight when war came to her hometown in southern Sudan. Overnight, childhood became terrifying. Some of the tricks she now uses on the runway she learned as a frightened child: Throwing her shoulders back and lengthening her body helped flatten her against the floor to escape the whizzing bullets of militiamen. Eventually, much of her family made its way to London. Wek spent her teenage years learning English, adjusting to British cuisine, going to school, babysitting for nephews and nieces. While wandering through a street fair in 1995, she was approached by an agent who asked if she’d ever considered modeling. Her mother worried that agents were just leeches, but Wek gave the fashion world a whirl anyway. Readers will be disarmed by the down-to-earth, intimate voice in which she narrates her stratospheric rise. Wek has used her platform to raise awareness about Sudan, meeting with members of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. She also reflects sagely on color and racism. “Whether I like it or not, my skin defines me,” she observes, admitting that her dark coloring has both helped and hurt her career. Initially, she had to fight against being typecast, offered only “work that called for ‘black’ features.” Now she ponders her possible complicity in the historical use of exploitative images of black people to sell everything from Robertson’s jam to Uncle Ben’s rice.
A celebrity autobiography with substance and political punch.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-124331-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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