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
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
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