Readers with hectic lives may find the pace a bit slow, but the poetry in Badkhen’s prose demands that readers slow down and...
A journalist records her impressions of living with a group of nomads as they travel with their herds of cows back and forth across Mali.
Badkhen, who was born in Russia and has often written from war zones (The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village, 2013, etc.), embedded herself with a Fulani family in West Africa whose members are still walking with their cows as their ancestors did thousands of years ago. On her journey, the author shared their lives, sleeping on a plastic tarp on the ground (sometimes with a child or a goat curled up next to her), cooking over a manure fire, eating millet and fish paste, churning buttermilk, bathing in a river, and learning their language. The measured pace of Fulani life, basically unchanged for millennia, served as a kind of balm for Badkhen, who was recovering from a recently ended, unhappy love affair. The Fulani cannot read the printed word, but they can read the sky, they know the seasons, and they cherish their cows. They told the author their stories and their myths, and she told them about the Big Bang and the long-ago migration of humans out of Africa. In lyrical and evocative prose, Badkhen writes of the beauty of the land and the sky and the grace and wisdom of the people. This is no Eden, however, for war planes fly overhead, climate change has brought long droughts, farms have been planted across the Fulani’s traditional travel routes, and modern technology is luring young men off to urban centers. The Fulani seem mostly unruffled by these threats to their lifestyle, however, adopting what suits them—e.g., plastic pails, flashlight batteries—keeping their faith in their cows, and synchronizing their lives with the seasons.
Readers with hectic lives may find the pace a bit slow, but the poetry in Badkhen’s prose demands that readers slow down and savor her gentle, elegant story.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-248-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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