An original, stimulating pep talk for a continent.
Africa must look to God for a way out of its malaise, argues this ambitious manifesto.
As a Ugandan who spent time in Idi Amin’s jail, an economist with the United Nations and a born-again Christian, the author brings a broad perspective to bear on the conundrum of Africa’s poverty and turmoil. Many of his recommendations echo mainstream reform proposals. Africans, Latigo insists, must rely on themselves instead of foreign-aid handouts. Political leaders should streamline government and focus it on maintaining peace and the rule of law instead of using it to enrich themselves. Economic policy should concentrate on building a vibrant private sector diversified away from commodity exports. But the heart of Latigo’s program is a call for Africans as individuals to undertake a thorough project of spiritual self-improvement based on “Godly values,” which comprise the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule and ideals of integrity and professionalism. He insists that people of all faiths can embrace this program, but his elaboration of it is heavily indebted to Evangelical doctrine and the Prosperity Gospel. (Buying a jet and building a 250-acre golf resort near his hometown are among the personal goals the author hopes God will help him achieve.) Latigo writes in an unusual variety of registers. He switches easily from sophisticated discussions of development economics—complete with lucid explanations of Gini coefficients and foreign-exchange fluctuations—to Christian dogmatics (“[t]he Holy Spirit is fully God, the third person of the Holy Trinity, who convicts the world of its sin and guilt”) and positive-thinking riffs (“[b]y following a few steps…you can get all the wealth you need and be the success you have always yearned to be”). He spikes the brew with nuggets of down-to-earth advice (“Avoid Too Many Unproductive Meetings”) and punchy exhortations to “Fight Dream Killers” and “Think Big and Dare to Try.” Some may find Latigo’s religiosity and sloganeering simplistic, but his case for age-old virtues and against passive, fatalistic mindsets is cogent and compelling.
An original, stimulating pep talk for a continent.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4269-1918-3
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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