Of interest to students of modern Africa, but less well written than Helene Cooper’s remarkable memoir The House at Sugar...
A carefully written memoir of life in Liberia, “a wonderful, beautiful, mixed-up country struggling mightily to find itself.”
So writes the country’s sitting president, who came to office in an improbably constitutional way. Sirleaf’s bloodline is instructive. She is part European, her maternal grandfather a German expelled from the country during World War I as a move to prove Liberia’s loyalty to the United States; her mother was “a fair-skinned child with long, wavy hair,” not the easiest thing to be in the ethnically torn nation. Her father was “tall, brown-skinned, and stylish…a son of a Gola chief from Bomi County.” Through luck and hard work, she attained a fine education at the College of West Africa. However, she notes, the view of her nation that she took away was the Americo-Liberian one, for Liberia had been settled in part by repatriated slaves who did not always fit in—and whose descendants still do not. After studying in America, she became an economic advisor to Liberia’s president in the late 1970s, a time when the economy began to falter, which in turn undid the near century of comparative political calm the country had enjoyed. The next two decades saw a coup during which Sirleaf was imprisoned, then the onset of a civil war that “killed a quarter of a million of our 3 million people and displaced most of the rest.” That she survived the succeeding regimes is testimony to her diplomatic skill and good fortune. Recounting these events and her rise to power, Sirleaf contextualizes contemporary events in the bigger picture. One of Africa’s chief problems, she writes, is debt, and one way to settle debt in the days of the Cold War was to align with the United States or the Soviets, at which point “the money flowed in”—and the blood began to flow out, which explains much recent history.
Of interest to students of modern Africa, but less well written than Helene Cooper’s remarkable memoir The House at Sugar Beach (2008), which addresses some of the same events.Pub Date: April 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-135347-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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