A strong collection of memoiristic writing that illuminates African womanhood while blending diverse styles and experiences.
Conte, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, collects 15 autobiographical essays by Ugandan women that question stereotypes of African femininity.
This anthology will introduce myriad new voices, some from Uganda’s women writers’ association, FEMRITE, to Western readers. All share an interest in reconciling traditional and Western practices. The opener, “My Name” by Nakisanze Segawa, uses names as cogent symbols of Christian and African values; she tells of how a hospital cashier refused to register her because she abandoned her “Christian” name in homage to Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. In another essay, Lydia Namubiru, who was raised Catholic, tells of how she feared demons ever since she witnessed an exorcism as a child: “There are no standards for balancing our imported faiths with our ancestral ones,” she notes. “Most people…straddle the fence.” The title piece by Caroline Ariba beautifully explores the gulf between educated, working women like herself and village women who bear many children, desperate for a son and heir. One of the responsibilities of ssengas, or paternal aunts, is to initiate girls into marriage and motherhood rites, and in Shifa Mwesigye’s “Ssengas and the Single Woman,” the collection’s standout, a bridal shower provides the occasion for a witty yet incisive dissection of gender roles. In it, a ssenga advocates total deference to one’s husband: kneeling, feeding him first, and washing him after sex. Although her friends laugh at this old-fashioned advice, Mwesigye recognizes that careful evaluation of traditional customs is healthier than knee-jerk rejection and that lessons on caring and service are valuable no matter their source. Two pieces on tomboy-hood seem repetitive, but most of the essays reveal fresh facets of African experience. For example, Peace Twine, in “Wife of the Enemy,” tells of enduring false arrest and months in a maximum security prison. In “No Time for Pain,” Harriet Anena artfully displaces the trauma of years in refugee camps using second-person narration, while haunting anonymous essays disclose sexual abuse and lesbian identity. “Change comes slowly,” Laura Walusimbi laments in her concluding piece on corporal punishment, later adding, “There are so many new challenges and no easy answers.”
A strong collection of memoiristic writing that illuminates African womanhood while blending diverse styles and experiences.Pub Date: June 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5076-8022-3
Page Count: 178
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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