Solid background, cinematic descriptions, and the author’s own intimate knowledge of the Sudan and the international aid...
Compelling portrait of an independent-minded British aid worker who married a Sudanese warlord.
Atlanta-based journalist Scroggins, who has reported from the Sudan, uses the story of Emma McCune, a young woman with fashion-model looks who found something in African culture missing from her own life, as a through-line to follow the neglected history of Africa in the 1980s and ’90s, ravaged by famine and genocidal tribal warfare. Daughter of a colonial tea plantation executive who killed himself after repatriation from India to England, McCune became involved with African student political groups as a college student in the UK in the mid-1980s. Once in the Sudan, she proved a diligent and charismatic figure, eschewing white privileges, behaving at times more Sudanese than Western, and developing an almost cult-like following, particularly among women and children. McCune became even more of a curiosity when she married the leader of an armed Sudanese faction, Riek Machar. This marriage alienated some of her former colleagues, and much of the organizational support she had relied on diminished when she appeared to be assuming some of her husband’s political views. Bouts with malaria and dysentery took their toll on her health, and she came to desperately lack funds, but she remained capable, according to one friend, of looking smashing in a cocktail dress while dining out with other whites in Nairobi (although someone else inevitably had to pay her bill). By the time of her 1993 death in a Nairobi traffic accident at age 29, she was pregnant, optimistic, and pressing ahead with new plans to assist Sudanese women. Her story had by then attracted the interest of several reporters and film documentarians, who found her singularly intriguing, but also a tad bizarre.
Solid background, cinematic descriptions, and the author’s own intimate knowledge of the Sudan and the international aid community in Africa, enhance this profile of a woman who gave herself fully to her ideals, and to her fate.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40397-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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