A compelling and, ultimately, heartbreaking story that demands to be read by anyone concerned about contemporary Africa.
The remarkable odyssey of a reporter’s attempt to cover the news and stay alive during a country’s descent into ruin.
American journalist Meldrum arrived in Zimbabwe in 1980 as a reporter for the British newspaper The Guardian, enthused with the assignment of reporting from the newly independent nation that had only recently emerged from years of white domination as Rhodesia. He left in 2003, physically expelled by the government of Robert Mugabe, in defiance of its own judiciary. At the time of his expulsion, he was the last foreign journalist reporting from a country that had suffered from two decades of Mugabe’s tyranny and corruption. Meldrum’s memoir of his Zimbabwe years is a harrowing and deeply disturbing record of that country’s downward spiral as the basic tenets of civilized society were ripped asunder: the repression of Zimbabwe’s once-free press, violent attacks against political opposition, the destruction of the national economy amid blatant mismanagement, the rise of a thuggish military elite to maintain dictatorial order, and divide-and-conquer policies that fostered racial and tribal animosity, with horrific results. Meldrum’s ability to stay alive and focused during this period is a tribute to his indefatigable spirit, and his crisp narrative is remarkably free of rancor toward those who wreaked havoc around him. Even more amazing were the many courageous opponents of the Mugabe regime who faced harassment, police assault, and imprisonment for daring voice their disgust with the deterioration of Zimbabwe. Their voices, while censored at home, speak loud and clear through Meldrum’s reporting, though their criticism meets only the virtual silence and inaction of the United Nations, various American and European governments and neighboring African nations. For his expulsion, Meldrum emerged from imprisonment and trial and was charged with being a threat to national security. That he left Zimbabwe alive is itself something of a miracle.
A compelling and, ultimately, heartbreaking story that demands to be read by anyone concerned about contemporary Africa.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-87113-896-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
