Smith vivifies the personalities and marshals the revolutionary events without overwhelming the reader.
A biography shepherded by the Nelson Mandela Foundation and written by an English journalist attains distance from and clarity on the life of the near-sainted South African leader.
Sunday Times Magazine contributor Smith (One Morning in Sarajevo: 28 June 1914, 2008, etc.) works back in time from the arrest of Mandela on Aug. 5, 1962, for inciting a strike and leaving the country without a passport. With the busting of the underground headquarters of the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) the next year, his papers were discovered, implicating him in revolution and sabotage against the apartheid state, which secured his imprisonment on Robben Island for the next 26 years. In this readable, well-calibrated account of Mandela’s early life, Smith attempts to get at the making of the revolutionary and leader, from an impoverished young law student to his rise through the ANC ranks, military training and authoring of “How to Be a Good Communist.” The son of a Thembu chief who defied the white magistrate, Mandela was the first of his father’s four wives’ families to be educated. At Fort Hare University, he met his future law partner and ANC colleague, Oliver Tambo. Mandela was already proving to be a student leader and oppositional figure, and he escaped an arranged tribal marriage and met Walter Sisulu, an ANC leader, helped him find a clerkship while attending law school in Johannesburg. Mentored by Sisulu, Mandela was duly enlightened to the appalling conditions imposed on black Africans by the fiercely racist apartheid structure. Tall and handsome, Mandela was also a ladies’ man, marrying Evelyn Mase in 1944 (they had several children), before divorcing her for the much younger social worker Winnie Madikizela, in 1958. Increasing leadership in the ANC involved long absences and strains on the marriage, while Mandela was embroiled in the Treason Trial of the mid-’50s, endured a five-year ban on public speaking and schisms within the ANC and advocated armed struggle by 1961.
Smith vivifies the personalities and marshals the revolutionary events without overwhelming the reader.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-03548-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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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