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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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