Visceral and emotionally complex—an impressive first book.
A memoir about a gay South African man’s coming of age in the waning days of apartheid.
In his debut, Retief (English and Creative Writing/Susquehanna Univ.) recalls growing up in a middle-class world where nothing was quite what it seemed. Living on a game preserve, where his father worked as animal behaviorist, the author, an outside due to his English birth, found love, comfort and safety within the warm cocoon of his family. As he approached his teenage years, however, painful realities began to emerge. He found himself increasingly drawn to other boys, and especially his best friend Dirkie, in ways that both disturbed and excited him. Retief also discovered that his cultivated, slightly eccentric grandfather was a pedophile who thought nothing of sexually abusing the author's younger sister, Lisa. His education in the dark side of human nature reached its most horrifying climax when his parents sent him to boarding school. There, he experienced his “life’s defining trauma”—torture at the hands of a sadistic student prefect named John. The underground economy of violence implied in this brutality became momentarily institutionalized in the “jack bank,” a “treasury of cruelty” into which Retief and other first-year boys could deposit beatings and then withdraw them whenever they overstepped the unwritten rules of conduct that ruled their lives. This Lord of the Flies–style adolescent savagery was really an apparatus of apartheid, “whereby white boys [were] bullied when they were young so that later they [would] know how to beat blacks into continued submission.” For the author, victimization led to a self-destructive relationship with danger and an unconscious identification with blacks that fueled an intense desire for black men. Retief’s revelations are profoundly intimate, but making his story public is a social necessity. “If no one is ever willing to break the protective silence of what goes on in individual lives,” he writes, “how will we ever learn from each other?”
Visceral and emotionally complex—an impressive first book.Pub Date: April 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-59093-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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