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THE ASSASSIN

Name: THE ASSASSIN
Author: Henk van Woerden
ISBN: 0-8050-6631-4

A STORY OF RACE AND RAGE IN THE LAND OF APARTHEID

by Henk van Woerden & translated by Dan Jacobson ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2001

A perfectly pitched biography that relies, as it should, as much on perceptive insights as documentation.

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A profile of the man who assassinated Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of South Africa’s policy of apartheid, that is both a compelling study of a tragically disturbed individual and an affecting metaphor for the apartheid years.

Van Woerden, whose working-class family emigrated from Holland to South Africa in 1956 (when the author was only nine) has a special sympathy for the “coloreds” (South Africans of mixed race) who still live in a kind of racial no-man’s-land, discriminated against by both black and white. They were his family’s neighbors until the early 1960s, when Verwoerd, implementing his policy of racial separation, removed them from the racially mixed Cape Town suburbs and settled them on the bleak Cape Flats. Demitrios Tsafendas, the parliamentary messenger who assassinated Verwoerd in 1966, was also a colored. Born in 1918 in Mozambique, his father was Greek and his mother a half-caste. Using documents assembled by the authorities, as well as interviews with the aging Tsafendas (confined in a psychiatric hospital until his death in 1999), the author creates a perceptive portrait. He sees Tsafendas as a tragic, gifted figure, tormented by racism and mental illness alike, and driven to act by Verwoerd’s treatment of the coloreds and his own experiences (especially those with his family in South Africa, who shunned him). Van Woerden traces the long painful journey that ended with the assassination and began in childhood (when Tsafendas was sent to Egypt to be raised by his paternal grandmother)—and included sojourns in Greece, Turkey, Portugal, and even the US (where his status as an ex-Communist, rather than his racial history, led to his deportation).

A perfectly pitched biography that relies, as it should, as much on perceptive insights as documentation.

Pub Date: June 7, 2001

ISBN: 0-8050-6631-4

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)