by Gerald David Mills ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 20, 2015
A memoir with insightful analysis of racial and cultural collisions that gets bogged down by its focus on amorous encounters.
A former Peace Corps volunteer remembers his two-year stint at a school in Africa.
Like hundreds of other young idealists of his generation, debut author Mills heeded President John F. Kennedy’s call and joined the Peace Corps to promote world peace and friendship. He was posted to Sierra Leone, where he taught for two years at a Seventh-day Adventist mission school just outside the capital, Freetown. In this unsettling memoir of that time, he recalls how idealism ran into “centuries-old barriers of colonialism” and how his efforts at educating the impoverished were overshadowed by his affair with one of his students. “Could I honestly answer I had come to Africa to pursue the ideal [Kennedy] held up for me” he asks at one point. “I had spent so much of my energy...walling out the Africa I had supposedly come to serve.” Initially, Mills says, he felt an “exhilarating expansiveness, for here I could be my own man,” and he’s particularly effective at conveying the sensory bombardment of his surroundings: “the stench of urine, raw sewage, dead fish, rotting fruit, and diesel fumes filled the air.” He also memorably portrays the characters who ran the school: headmaster Mr. Campbell, a sardonic Englishman who displays his casual racism by describing the natives as “chimps in the hills,” and his Swedish wife, whose midriff “pooched like an inviting pillow where a man might surely want to rest his head.” The author tells of how he became aware of his own “unconscious cultural posture” when he berated a student for using his bathtub: “Unseen hands had hung an invisible sign above the bathroom door—‘Whites Only,’ ” he writes. The book suffers, however, from its fixation on sexual adventures, which range from a wet dream to several real-life encounters, related in oddly stilted language (“my tumescent lust exploded”). The affair with the Sierra Leonean student, as portrayed here—which ends with her getting pregnant and abandoned by Mills—seems, at best, a gross betrayal of the teacher-pupil relationship. The book gropes for justification by suggesting that the affair helped the author to form “a mysterious connection...between myself and Africa” as he lost the “nagging awareness of my whiteness.”
A memoir with insightful analysis of racial and cultural collisions that gets bogged down by its focus on amorous encounters.Pub Date: April 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5087-4873-1
Page Count: 454
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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