SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW

Name: SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW
Author: Gavin Bell
ISBN: 0-316-85359-3

by Gavin Bell ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

With an eye to the significant as well as the picturesque, this breezy and informative account captures the best and worst...

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A British journalist who covered South Africa during the apartheid era revisits the country as a tourist and suggests that, while crime and corruption are hurting the new nation, its “exuberant assortment of races and tribes” will somehow survive.

As a reporter, Bell wrote only about politics, but in the late 1990s he wanted to see the sights and to learn more about the mix of people Archbishop Desmond Tutu christened the “Rainbow Nation.” So he spent six months touring the country, beginning and ending his travels (a mix of conventional sightseeing and journalistic fact-finding) in Cape Town. Bell climbed Table Mountain and visited such historically significant places as St. George’s Cathedral, site of many anti-apartheid protests, and Ruben Island, Nelson Mandela’s prison for 26 years. But he also attended a session of parliament, from which former foes now emerge arm-in-arm. He met “coloreds,” people of mixed race who feel the new African government is ignoring them, and whites like Humpies, an Afrikaans wine farmer who has adjusted to the change but is worried about crime. Bell then traveled west by car to Aplington in the desert, stopping along the way in Orange, a whites-only settlement, and at a farm with a pet cheetah that liked to watch television. He visited Johannesburg and Pretoria, as well as tourist spots like the Kruger Game Preserve and the casinos at Sun City. He concludes that South Africans’ two great concerns are crime and government corruption. Blacks and whites all cite their fear of the gangs that hijack cars, rape, and kill indiscriminately, turning formerly vibrant city centers into dangerous killing fields.

With an eye to the significant as well as the picturesque, this breezy and informative account captures the best and worst of the new South Africa.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-316-85359-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Little, Brown UK/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. AND THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

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MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. AND THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

by Frances E. Ruffin & edited by Stephen Marchesi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2001

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This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-448-42421-5

Page Count: 48

Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM

by David Sedaris ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2004

Sedaris’s sense of life’s absurdity is on full, fine display, as is his emotional body armor. Fortunately, he has plenty of...

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Known for his self-deprecating wit and the harmlessly eccentric antics of his family, Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day, 2000, etc.) can also pinch until it hurts in this collection of autobiographical vignettes.

Once again we are treated to the author’s gift for deadpan humor, especially when poking fun at his family and neighbors. He draws some of the material from his youth, like the portrait of the folks across the street who didn’t own a TV (“What must it be like to be so ignorant and alone?” he wonders) and went trick-or-treating on November first. Or the story of the time his mother, after a fifth snow day in a row, chucked all the Sedaris kids out the door and locked it. To get back in, the older kids devised a plan wherein the youngest, affection-hungry Tiffany, would be hit by a car: “Her eagerness to please is absolute and naked. When we ask her to lie in the middle of the street, her only question was ‘Where?’ ” Some of the tales cover more recent incidents, such as his sister’s retrieval of a turkey from a garbage can; when Sedaris beards her about it, she responds, “Listen to you. If it didn’t come from Balducci’s, if it wasn’t raised on polenta and wild baby acorns, it has to be dangerous.” But family members’ square-peggedness is more than a little pathetic, and the fact that they are fodder for his stories doesn’t sit easy with Sedaris. He’ll quip, “Your life, your privacy, your occasional sorrow—it’s not like you're going to do anything with it,” as guilt pokes its nose around the corner of the page. Then he’ll hitch himself up and lacerate them once again, but not without affection even when the sting is strongest. Besides, his favorite target is himself: his obsessive-compulsiveness and his own membership in this company of oddfellows.

Sedaris’s sense of life’s absurdity is on full, fine display, as is his emotional body armor. Fortunately, he has plenty of both.