Well-written, though doesn’t offer much more than any recent edition of, say, the CIA World Factbook—save that Norman’s...
Condemnatory biography of the now 84-year-old Zimbabwean dictator who has made news—none good—since 1980 and regularly figures in the headlines today for rigging elections and disappearing opponents.
Greeted as a liberator when his country, formerly Southern Rhodesia, declared independence in 1980, Robert Mugabe quickly embarked on a program of nationalization. Notable among his targets, writes biographer Norman (Arthur Conan Doyle, 2007, etc.), who lived in Southern Rhodesia in the late ’50s, were the country’s white farmers. “At the beginning of the 1980s, Zimbabwe’s economy was booming,” Norman writes. Those 6,000 farmers employed 300,000 black workers and produced vast exports, including two million tons of corn per year. Zimbabwe now imports corn and most of its other foodstuffs, and its people routinely suffer famine and malnutrition—even as Mugabe is building a museum honoring his achievements at whose center, Norman notes, will stand “a 16-foot-long stuffed Nile crocodile—a recent birthday present from his loyal ministers and officials.” Plenty of dictators, tyrants and tinhorns have behaved poorly throughout world history; Norman suggests that Mugabe stands tall among them, if only because he apparently has no ideology apart from himself. The author charges that Mugabe became a Marxist, for instance, mostly out of convenience, since communism seemed to assure the success of a cult of personality and since communists seemed to rule indefinitely—or, as Mugabe put it, “What appealed to us most over our induction into communism was the firm instruction that: ‘Once you had become the government, you remain in government for ever.’ ” Mugabe retains power through terror, writes Norman, and with the knowledge that the European Union and the United States will not interfere with his misrule “for fear of being branded imperialist.”
Well-written, though doesn’t offer much more than any recent edition of, say, the CIA World Factbook—save that Norman’s righteous indignation is joined by some truly horrific photographs that provide more evidence of the regime’s brutality.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-8622-7491-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The History Press/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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
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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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