Of interest to followers of Hofmann’s other books about Africa but not especially compelling otherwise.
The best-selling German author of The White Masai recounts her unexpected return to Africa.
In 2008, Hofmann decided it was time to put her African past behind her. Eager for a new adventure, she set out from her home in Switzerland for New Delhi. But no matter where she went in India, all she could see was her beloved Kenya. At home in Europe, Hofmann answered an ad in a magazine for a travel companion willing to travel “where the world was still wild” and discovered that trip would take her to Namibia—right back to the continent that would not leave her soul. Her expedition started in the ferociously hot savannah wilderness just outside Etosha National Park. She witnessed spectacular scenery and traveled through villages populated by the hardy Himba people, whose joyful appreciation for the little they had made her aware of the “comfortable existence” she lived in Europe. Several months after her return to Switzerland, Hofmann decided to travel back to Nairobi, where she observed the work of French charity Solidarités International and talked at length with slum dwellers who had managed to survive—and even more remarkably, to dare to dream of a better future—in the face of extreme poverty, crime and AIDS. Hofmann later returned to Kenya again with her daughter to visit the family of the Masai warrior ex-husband she had deeply loved as a young woman but from whose jealous rages she eventually fled. Narrated with genuine affection for all things African, Hofmann’s book is only somewhat interesting as a travelogue and even less so as a memoir of homecoming. The superficial treatment it offers of her own conflicted feelings toward the complex figure of her husband is disappointing and unsatisfying.
Of interest to followers of Hofmann’s other books about Africa but not especially compelling otherwise.Pub Date: July 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-908129-45-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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