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ONE DAY I WILL WRITE ABOUT THIS PLACE

Name: ONE DAY I WILL WRITE ABOUT THIS PLACE
Author: Binyavanga Wainaina
ISBN: 978-1-55597-591-3

A MEMOIR

by Binyavanga Wainaina ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 19, 2011

Language is clearly the author’s preferred mode of structuring the world, but it is also the plaything he uses with...

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A colorful, at times surreal debut memoir about coming of age in the hyper-diverse culture of late-20th-century Kenya.

Although he came from ethnically “mixed up” parents, Caine Prize–winning author Wainaina had an ordinary childhood. During the week, he went to school and on weekends played at his Uganda-born mother’s hair salon, “the only proper [one] in Nakuru…the fourth largest town Kenya.” His father, head of the national Pyrethrum Board, was a member of Kenya’s most populous—and politically powerful—ethnic group, the Gikuyu. When the country’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta (also a Gikuyu) died in 1978 and Daniel arap Moi, a Kalenjin, took over, life began to change. To the outside world, Moi’s Kenya appeared “an island of peace” in the sea of conflict-ridden East Africa. But the reality was far different. There was fierce competition between the many Kenyan tribes, and the country’s cacophony of language and sounds was little more than background noise to be endured rather the celebrated. By 1983, Moi, who had survived a coup attempt the year before, was showing tribal favoritism. Top-ranked high schools denied Wainaina, an excellent student, entrance at the same time that Kalenjins began replacing Gikuyus throughout the education system. As national politics turned increasingly bitter, “a fever of rapture-seeking” seized Kenya. With the country’s university system in disarray, Wainaina traveled to post-apartheid South Africa to study finance. Homesick, he withdrew both socially and emotionally and immersed himself in literature. He returned to Kenya but eventually went back to South Africa, ostensibly to finish his degree. Instead, he found himself actively ordering the chaos of culture, language and politics around him “on the written page.”

Language is clearly the author’s preferred mode of structuring the world, but it is also the plaything he uses with idiosyncratic grace and brilliant immediacy to capture “the scattered, shifting sensations” of memories and emotions long past.

Pub Date: July 19, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-55597-591-3

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT AFRICA
by Binyavanga Wainaina ; edited by Achal Prabhala

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)