A very unsatisfactory follow-up.
Hofmann returns to Kenya 14 years after marrying a Masai warrior and giving birth to his child.
Oddly, this second sequel to four-million-copy bestseller The White Masai (2006) is being released before its immediate predecessor, Back From Africa, which deals with the author’s post-Kenyan life back home in Switzerland. So Hofmann’s considerable readership is immediately transported back to familiar territory, as she begins this installment by expressing a few self-doubts about the return venture and then heading back to search for her former husband, Lketinga. But the success of Hofmann’s memoir has made this trip altogether different, and she spends a generous portion of the book discussing the movie adaptation of The White Masai, which is being shot at the same time as her reunion with Lketinga and his family. Also, she has divorced Lketinga, although this means nothing in Africa, where she is still regarded as one of his wives. Hofmann sticks to the short, staccato prose that made the original book so successful, and she delights in being reunited with her former husband, his mother and many others. But once those events are documented, the narrative doesn’t really go anywhere. It lacks both the specificity and the sense of wide-eyed wonder that Hofmann’s first memoir delivered so effectively, and it often feels like she’s struggling to stir new ingredients into the pot. Most disappointingly, the author doesn’t bring along her now-teenage daughter, Napirai, which would surely have led to some intriguing moments with Lketinga. In fact, it often seems as though both Hofmann and her former husband have simply moved on; the connection they once enjoyed has vanished from both their lives and, in turn, from Hofmann’s prose. Fleeting interest is created by Lketinga’s thoughts on mercenary journalists who have tracked him down in the wake of the first book’s success, but there are too many dull details, especially concerning the unremarkable movie shoot.
A very unsatisfactory follow-up.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-905147-13-7
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Bliss/Arcadia Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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