A detailed book about an extraordinary man and his belief that “only dialogue can save humanity from the perils of war.”
Berrah’s debut memoir offers a history of the struggle for self-rule by North African nations and a vision of a peaceful world.
The author began life in Aïn Beïda, a small town in Algeria, at a time when France had annexed the country. Keenly aware of the second-class status accorded native Algerians, he resented the fact that his teachers taught French history but “nothing about our Algerian heritage.” As a medical student in France, he met other Muslim students dealing with discrimination. In the early 1950s, they formed the Association of North African Muslim Students, one of numerous anti-colonial associations with which he became involved. Berrah accepted a Ministry of Health assignment in the war-torn Moroccan town of Missour, earning him praise from peers and supervisors. Later, at the University of Indiana, he made a scientific breakthrough involving the inhibition of DNA synthesis; he accepted a professorship at the Yale School of Medicine in 1963 and was elected to the New York Academy of Sciences in 1966. Feeling the need to “work for a better world,” he accepted a post as an adviser to the Foreign Ministry of Côte d’Ivoire in 1965 and became President Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s closest counselor. In the course of his career, he met with world leaders, including several American presidents, Charles De Gaulle, Fidel Castro, and Golda Meir. The memoir’s detailed, relatively dispassionate prose reflects Berrah’s commitment to diplomacy. He tells one story that effectively illustrates his creativity in that arena; he was asked at a 1973 summit of Non-Aligned Countries how to handle an inflammatory speech by Castro, in progress, which was loaded with personal insults about President Houphouët-Boigny. Berrah simply had Castro’s microphone feed cut and “pretend[ed] there was a technical problem.” Although the multitude of association names and acronyms is overwhelming at times, readers will appreciate the author’s meticulous descriptions of the places he visited; for example, he tells of how the peacocks at President Houphouët-Boigny’s palace “showed off their vivid blue bodies, radiant with emerald iridescence.”
A detailed book about an extraordinary man and his belief that “only dialogue can save humanity from the perils of war.”Pub Date: March 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-42031-8
Page Count: 644
Publisher: Dr. Ghoulem Berrah Foundation
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2019
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
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
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