An intriguing historical document, particularly for readers who have a passion for West Africa and narratives of the...
Personal missives to family and striking images reveal the daily lives of an American couple living in the West African country of Nigeria in the early 1960s.
As a couple of ambitious graduate students who’d advocated for the creation of a diplomatic “peace army,” even before the election of John F. Kennedy, Clark and her husband, Peter, were more than ready to drop their studies for the opportunity to live in Nigeria. From 1961 to ’62, she sent letters back home to her family members detailing the exotic landscape of Lagos as it underwent major change. She worked there as a secretary for various international organizations while Peter furthered his career in economics and international development, which gave them access to important political events as well as to the intoxicating sights and sounds of local markets. The author relates all of this in great detail in her letters, which she presents here mostly unedited; in them, she wistfully describes such things as the weekends that she and her husband spent sailing or the effect of the hot climate on Nigerian business hours. She also writes of developing a strong friendship with and reliance on their house servant, Columbus, as they tried to better understand their new home and eventually welcome their new child into it. Accompanying all of these reflections are incredible color photos, taken by Peter, that help immensely to illustrate the unique time and place. Clark writes earnestly about her desire to help the Nigerian people and about her discomfort at the class distinctions between masters and servants in society and in her own home (“Peter is always referred to as ‘Master’ and I am ‘Madam.’ Horrible”). However, her point of view throughout the letters is clearly rooted in her position as a wealthy expatriate; accounts of dinners with notable journalists and diplomats and of gossip from around the yacht club pepper the entries. The collection as a whole might have benefited greatly from stronger editing; aside from an excellent foreword and afterword, Clark offers few opportunities for contextualization and reflection beyond the letters’ personal, intimate nature. That said, the collection does offer stylish, enjoyable prose and keen observations on daily life in a fascinating place.
An intriguing historical document, particularly for readers who have a passion for West Africa and narratives of the expatriate experience.Pub Date: June 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942155-13-3
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Peter E. Randall
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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