A rich and detailed account about Africa, America, and the importance of history.
A debut memoir traces a professor’s intricate journey from Nigeria to the United States.
Soremekun grew up in a Nigeria still under British rule during World War II. As a child, he observed both modern colonialism and the long-lasting traditions of the native population. His larger-than-life grandfather, who lived with several wives on a compound, was ruled by superstition even as the family became Methodists. From there, the author’s father moved the family to Lagos, which, for Soremekun, was like “a giant theater” of activity and excitement. It was also in Lagos that he proved his worth as a student, earning outstanding marks in the British school system and opening the door to a university. But movies, issues of Reader’s Digest, and various pen pals would instill a deep fascination for the United States—an interest so intense it earned him the nickname “American boy.” Soremekun eventually chose to study history at a college in Kansas, making the long trip by boat, and then completed a master’s and Ph.D. in history, concentrating on African studies, at Northwestern University. Throughout the rest of his adult life, the author and his wife, Elizabeth, would go back and forth between California and Africa. He would work as a church janitor, a laborer, and a scholar of Angolan missionaries, eventually founding a school benefiting the next African generation. As a historian, Soremekun delves into the context of his life events without generalizing or ever oversimplifying. He examines how, even as a child in Lagos, he was able to see the ways that colonial rulers used tribalism to sow discord among locals, giving police powers to certain groups and not to others. He writes with care about the simultaneous liberation of Africa and the civil rights movement in the United States in the early 1960s, discussing the “alienation” of continental Africans from African-Americans. The author has perhaps packed too much into one work, leaving some of these subjects underdeveloped to continue relating the various incidents of his long life. Still, this remains a captivating story.
A rich and detailed account about Africa, America, and the importance of history.Pub Date: March 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973623-08-3
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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