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
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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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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