A history, both broad and personal, of social struggles throughout Africa, told with care and depth.
An Episcopal priest reflects on his volatile years spent in Africa and its incredible landscape in this debut memoir.
In Los Angeles in the early 1950s, Mallory had just entered UCLA, started a family, and was looking forward to an affluent life. At the same time, a similarly young South African named Jacob Kuhangwa faced the harsh realities of apartheid and a difficult journey across the continent. “I fussed because a light rain made things unpleasant; where Jacob lived, crops were failing and people were dying because of a prolonged drought,” Mallory writes. He follows the sharp contrast between these two parallel journeys until they meet years later in New York City, where Jacob first inspired Mallory—at the time completing seminary school—to pursue his priesthood in South-West Africa. “Who in their right mind would choose that over wealthy San Marino?” Mallory asks. “I wasn’t in my right mind, but I chose Africa.” The decision led him, his wife, and their young child to the mining town of Tsumeb, controlled by a nefarious American businessman who warned them not to make trouble. Over the course of nearly two decades, Mallory and his family traveled and lived across southern and eastern Africa, including Botswana, Uganda, and South Sudan—“years…finding nothing but harsh laws and cruel treatment.” But they also discovered hope as Mallory’s own worldview expanded exponentially with each attempt to challenge racism, injustice, and homophobia. Exceedingly diligent in constructing his memoir, Mallory brings scholarly attention to the various tribes and countries he encountered, always choosing complex qualifications over sweeping generalizations. But he also creates an intimacy reminiscent of more emotionally driven memoirs, namely Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. Later sections can be burdened by this attentiveness, with Mallory dedicating too many pages to the minutiae of everyday life or church politics; these sections never attain the same exciting rhythm that the author’s early parallels with Jacob achieve. But overall, Mallory’s tendency to question and analyze every detail offers readers a rich and intricate view of African societies through the late 20th century.
A history, both broad and personal, of social struggles throughout Africa, told with care and depth.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5043-5852-1
Page Count: 318
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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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