A powerful contribution to modern Nigerian history, particularly significant in an age of ethnic conflict around the world.
A pensive quest for the truths of a civil war in the author’s homeland of Nigeria.
On July 6, 1967, “after a year and a half of cataclysms,” Nigeria collapsed in a civil war based on ethnic divisions among the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo peoples that had long simmered under decades of British colonialism. The Igbo, Iduma’s people, occupied the region called Biafra, which calved off as a self-styled independent republic, causing the central government to declare war—which it called a “police action”—in order to keep Nigeria whole. After a genocidal conflict that lasted more than two years, Biafra was reassimilated into Nigeria. Born in 1989, Iduma grew up in a country where memories of the conflict were silenced. As he writes of his cohort, “we are a generation that has to lift itself from the hushes and gaps of the history of the war.” After living in New York for years, he returned to Nigeria to seek answers to his many questions, not least the fate of an uncle who disappeared during the war. How did the other young men of his family survive? The author concludes that they must have been protected by warlordlike military officers who threw some soldiers into battle as cannon fodder while keeping themselves far from the fighting. One refrain that Iduma’s father often voiced of his brother, he learns, was a simple question: “What if one day he returned from nowhere?” The chances of that remain slender, but, after all, other Biafrans lived in exile for years in places such as the nearby Ivory Coast before returning. In all events, Iduma is scarcely alone: A third of Biafran families, he reckons, “could speak of someone who did not return.” Though his own findings are far from definitive, the author delivers a poignant story rescued from those silences and lacunae.
A powerful contribution to modern Nigerian history, particularly significant in an age of ethnic conflict around the world.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781643751016
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Lucci’s legion of fans will adore this gracious nod to her career longevity and positivity.
Daytime television’s most recognizable actress digs deeper in this second memoir.
Her career-defining, four decades–long stint on the daytime soap All My Children as the villainous Erica Kane has made Lucci a recognizable household name in daytime television circles. In this sophomore effort, comprised of a vivid and engaging collection of anecdotes and adventures, the actress reveals more intimate details of her struggles as well as her personal life and professional career. From the time she began performing in high school stage musicals, Lucci admits to always wanting to be onstage. Working through chronic shyness, her self-motivation and spirit drove her to pursue an acting career despite the many disappointments, callous dismissals, and various roadblocks that stood in her way. She expresses an open admiration for her parents, fellow performers who mentored her up the Hollywood ladder, and Muhammad Ali, who “owned his excellence,” as models of inspiration. Other sections reflect on her time as a working mother, the tricks to “growing old gracefully,” and how her faith, quest for joy, love of reading, and zest for life continue to sustain her. In an effort to create a more balanced memoir, Lucci also opens up to candidly share several sad and unsavory moments like being told she should probably abandon a career in television because she was too “ethnic looking”; the devastating day All My Children was canceled; the near loss of her son, Andreas, as an infant; and the feeling, upon the death of her husband, Helmut, in 2022, that the light within her “had gone out forever.” However crushing these events in her life were, they were counterbalanced with uplifting triumphs and only served as motivators to continue pushing forward to seek out the success and happiness she knew she deserved. With verve and perseverance, Lucci gleefully boasts about her starring roles in off-Broadway hits and concurrent film roles, yet, in her late 70s, she remains deeply grateful and humble and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.
Lucci’s legion of fans will adore this gracious nod to her career longevity and positivity.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9798874868284
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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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