Eye-opening memoir weaving violent Zimbabwean politics with the camaraderie and fearlessness of a family in crisis.
A Brooklyn travel writer returns to his South African homeland to rescue the family farm from imminent danger.
Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Rogers kept his eye on the tumultuous political situation in his native land from afar, as white farmers, a small fraction of Africa’s population, were routinely murdered or terrorized into surrendering their farm land. This posed a distressing situation for the author since his parents owned and operated Drifters, a backpacker tourist lodge attached to a farm. Rogers traveled from his London home in 2002 to pen an article on the upheaval, arriving in the midst of a presidential electoral scandal while the unrelenting land invasions continued to force thousands to flee. The stories recounted by his parents were horrific. Neighboring farms were being ambushed by “war veterans” violently reclaiming land under the auspices of President Robert Mugabe. By 2004, Rogers, now in his late 30s, had relocated to a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood with his fiancée. But things continued to degrade for his incredibly resilient parents, who found themselves surrounded by prostituting “settlers,” illegal diamond dealers and a marijuana plantation, all while the secret meetings of the anti-Mugabe “Movement for Democratic Change” prospered. The author’s parents’ worst fears were confirmed when a family friend warned that a ruthless, powerful political commissar had moved in across the street—“an organizer, a militant, an idealogue, someone who might get the settlers riled up about more land and eyeing my parents’ own home”—set to wreak havoc on the family business. Fortunately, some clever negotiating mediated disaster, and a unification rally energized the camp of Mugabe rival Morgan Tsvangirai. But more trouble awaited the farm, along with lots of legal wrangling and a bittersweet, disquieting conclusion. Though the second half of the book meanders and diminishes in urgency, the Mozambique frontier of the author’s youth remains a deadly, perfidious place to behold, near or far.
Eye-opening memoir weaving violent Zimbabwean politics with the camaraderie and fearlessness of a family in crisis.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-40797-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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