Both an informative primer on Nigeria’s history of Islamist conflict and a passionate testimonial on behalf of the 218...
An empathetic inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the 2014 kidnapping of 276 girls from the Chibok Secondary School in Nigeria by the Islamist group Boko Haram.
Nigerian-born poet and novelist Habila (Oil on Water, 2010, etc.) seeks to remind the global community of the plight of the kidnapped girls, most still presumed to be held somewhere in Boko Haram’s forested strongholds in northern Nigeria or in the terrorist group’s bolt-holes in neighboring Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. The author is less interested in assigning blame to former president Goodluck Jonathan’s halfhearted counterterrorism efforts or the international community’s short attention span than in detailing the complex fault lines that perpetuate Boko Haram’s brutal insurgency. After at least two centuries of ethnic and religious conflict, Habila writes that most Nigerians—especially in the north—are “always Muslim or Christian first, ethnic affiliation second, and Nigerian third.” The author briefly traces the history of these conflicts but leaves a more thorough accounting in the hands of historians. While Habila’s purpose is essentially journalistic, he does not shy away from heartbreaking literary asides. He writes of visiting Chibok years after the girls were taken: “it was like going to Hamelin and feeling the weight of the absent boys taken by the Pied Piper.” Habila also identifies long-running themes, tying Boko Haram’s kidnappings back to the Sokoto Caliphate, a 19th-century political entity established through jihad and economically sustained by enslaved Christians from Nigeria’s “Middle Belt.” According to the author, when Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, announced in a propaganda video, “I took your girls. I will turn your girls into slaves,” their parents, “descendants of the Middle Belt ‘pagans,’ understood exactly what he was saying.”
Both an informative primer on Nigeria’s history of Islamist conflict and a passionate testimonial on behalf of the 218 Chibok girls still missing.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9971264-6-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
