A cautionary but sympathetic story of a man obsessed, though less perniciously than most.
Sensitive chronicle of a complex man who came to Africa to found his own kingdom, built a castle for the woman he loved, and ruled his subjects with a firm but benevolent hand.
Born in 1873, Stewart Gore-Browne was a Victorian shaped by the ideals of his time: service to country, the betterment of those less fortunate, romantic love for a perfect, unattainable woman. Educated at Harrow, he spent most of his time with his father’s younger sister Ethel and her wealthy, much older husband Hugh. Intelligent and beautiful, Ethel inspired a lifelong devotion in Gore-Browne, who wrote to her regularly, confided in her, and dreamed that she would someday come to live in the “Africa house” he built for her. In early 1914, seconded to an Anglo-Belgian Boundary Commission as a British officer, Gore-Browne first saw Shiwa Ngandu, the “Lake of the Royal Crocodiles” in what is today northern Zambia, and immediately recognized it as the kingdom he had dreamed of. World War I intervened, but in 1920 he was back in Africa, the owner of 23,000 acres, at work on the house and the model village he had so long planned. Food, furniture, and all other necessities had to travel by land and canoe more than 400 miles from the nearest rail halt, and Lamb, foreign-affairs correspondent of London’s Sunday Times, vividly details how extraordinary Gore-Browne’s overly ambitious achievement was. In a place where lions and crocodile regularly ate the unwary and leopards peeked in the windows, he built a three-story building, “part Tuscan manor house, part grand English ancestral home,” surrounded by gardens and orchards. Lamb (The Sewing Circles of Herat, not reviewed) chronicles his unhappy marriage to a much younger woman, his failed agricultural ventures, and the house’s evolution into a famous landmark. She also describes Gore-Browne’s commitment to Zambia’s independence and to African education, as well as his friendship with the newly independent nation’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda.
A cautionary but sympathetic story of a man obsessed, though less perniciously than most.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-073587-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
