A worthy addition to the canon of Mandela literature that details a relationship that many knew about but few truly...
After more than a decade as a prison guard overseeing Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), Brand, with the assistance of Mail on Sunday Africa correspondent Jones, chronicles the unlikely personal relationship they built.
The author’s story begins with his idyllic-sounding upbringing. His parents, who raised him in a rural area far from the worst apartheid policing, taught him kindness and respect for people of all races, but particularly for his elders. So when Brand met his prisoner, a 60-year-old political activist, he was bound to see the respectful, gentle man as someone who deserved his respect in turn. Out of that respect grew a relationship that began as showing kindness when he could and morphed into a willingness to break some rules in order to demonstrate his true humanity to Mandela and his fellow political prisoners. Brand helped Mandela find time alone to study, spoke with him in Afrikaans when Mandela was learning the language, spent time with the prisoner when he was in isolation and made sure some little luxuries were available. Eventually, the two became friends, with Mandela even helping to put Brand’s son through schooling for a career as a commercial diver. The prose is straightforward, but the lack of flowery language makes it refreshingly easy to focus on the story without distraction. This isn’t a full biography of Mandela, so those looking for more information about his politics, party or background should seek out supplemental materials. The author quickly recounts Mandela’s general biography, including the Rivonia trial for sabotage that landed him in prison, but this is really a tale of two men and their shared humanity in an inhumane place.
A worthy addition to the canon of Mandela literature that details a relationship that many knew about but few truly understood.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1250055262
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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