A Nigerian poet and former student of Achebe's furnishes a diligent if plodding curriculum vitae of the eminent Nigerian novelist and educator. One of the first postcolonial African writers to achieve an international reputation, Albert Chinualumogua Achebe has lived a plethora of lives—as a civil servant, editor, activist, man of letters, and Nigeria's foremost literary ambassador. In addition to his novels, short stories, and poetry, his lifetime's paper trail extends from early articles in university publications through writings on African independence and nationalism to interviews, addresses, and lectures—all of which Ezenwa-Ohaeto has perused for this respectful but remote biography. Achebe received the best and worst of a colonial education (public school English and H. Rider Haggard) but cultivated an individual vision with the prospect of Nigerian independence. His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), broke the mold of colonial literature by portraying traditional, preimperial Igbo culture; it was published while he was working in broadcasting for the newly independent Nigeria. His later A Man of the People (1966) bitterly satirized government corruption, proving ironically prescient in its portrayal of election fraud and a military coup. Ezenwa-Ohaeto, for his part, seems reluctant to confront the darkest period of the country's history. The circumstances of the army's coup d'Çtat and the subsequent civil war get sketchy treatment for all their enormity, as does Achebe's role in the failed separatist Republic of Biafra. And his cutting off this biography in 1993, before the Babangida government's worst crackdowns on political opposition, is disappointingly precipitous. More a biographic panegyric for a personage than a depiction of an exceptional person. (25 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-253-33342-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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