An often engaging tale of survival in the face of adversity.
In this debut memoir, a woman’s Christian faith helps her cope with her brutal upbringing in the Zimbabwe wilderness.
Doly narrates her life story, beginning in rural Zimbabwe when her mother died shortly after giving birth to her. The author and her sister briefly lived with her polygamist father and one of his wives (the one with the fewest children of her own). During this time, she was routinely beaten and starved. When her father eventually lost patience with her, he gave her to his ne’er-do-well brother and his wife, a barren woman afraid of the social stigma of being a wife with no children. This couple lived on a remote farmstead, and young Doly was given the job of tending cattle every day, in all kinds of weather. Her new foster parents abused her even more savagely and treated her more like a slave than a child, ignoring her complaints and doing nothing to help her even when she was stung by a scorpion. One day, another of her uncles happened to be passing by and, deploring her conditions, rescued her. At this point, the narrative abruptly jumps forward to the author’s marriage to a reserved young man named Honest, with whom she had many children and a comfortable life, until the Rhodesian Security Forces killed him in 1979. (Unfortunately, the book never adequately explains the internal conflicts of Zimbabwe in the 1970s, aside from how they affected the author’s marriage prospects.) The author soon met and later married Paul, an army officer with whom she had her only daughter. Doly began university studies and had a healthy, growing family, and she relates the usual ups and downs, such as the deaths of older family members and her children’s educations and jobs. The author repeats motivational assertions of faith throughout this memoir (“If God did it for me, He can do it for you!”), which may not appeal to all readers. However, the memoir offers a very human, universal story of resilience. Overall, many readers will find this an intriguing, if not very detailed, story of one woman’s escape from African poverty.
An often engaging tale of survival in the face of adversity.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491801451
Page Count: 72
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2014
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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