An engrossing memoir of the end of empire and the birth of independent Ghana.
In his debut memoir, Wedd shares his experiences as a British army officer during Ghana’s transition to independence.
The author was, in many ways, a typical cog of British colonialism when he arrived at the Gold Coast in 1956. Still in his teens and fresh out of officer training, he requested a commission in Africa out of a vague desire for adventure. “[I]t’s the White Man’s Grave,” his father joked of the Gold Coast, “but I don’t expect that bothers you!” The colony was slated for statehood—the first African colony to gain independence from British rule—and Wedd was there to assist in the transition. After the ceremony and jubilation that marked Ghana’s birth in March 1957, he stayed on to witness the new nation’s first tenuous steps as it established its government and military. Many thought that a fully integrated army, with blacks and whites serving as equals, was an impossibility, but the author describes the remarkable ease with which it coalesced. Wedd indulged his own love of wildlife by helping to explore the jungles of southern and central Ghana, and he also embarked on a long, difficult overland journey to the legendary city of Timbuktu in French Sudan. He writes in jovial prose that perfectly embodies the high-spirited eagerness of the British officer class of the late empire; at the same time, there’s none of the nastiness that modern readers might associate with imperialism itself. His account reflects his deep love of the land, of animals, of travel, and, most of all, of the Ghanaian people. Indeed, his affection for his Ghanaian comrades forms the emotional core of this memoir: in them, he first saw (and still sees, after half a century) the young country’s confidence and potential. Overall, the book serves best as a travelogue through a moment of history—an account of a transition from one system to another. Both may seem anachronistic, yet captivating, to readers today.
An engrossing memoir of the end of empire and the birth of independent Ghana.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-1425980306
Page Count: 292
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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