A family story unlike any other that unsparingly excavates the pain of small minds and inflexible traditions.
Dietch’s (Yaounde Univ./Private Law) novel explores the plight of an embittered African man whose parents commit suicide after discovering that four of their five children are gay.
Jean-Noel, the youngest son of five siblings, leaves his native African village to become a tour guide in order to escape the tragedy of his family. His three brothers left home to live in Europe, initially breaking the hearts of their parents, who are further shocked to learn that all three of them are gay. When it’s also revealed that their daughter is having an affair with a powerful woman, Jean-Noel’s parents kill themselves, as they’re unable to face the village’s condemnation. Jean-Noel blames his siblings’ sexual orientation on the global media, believing homosexuality to be an “imported” phenomenon. He attempts to start a family of his own only to discover that he’s infertile. When Rocky, a Los Angeles–based screenwriter, comes to the country for a vacation and enlists Jean-Noel’s services, the young African man is forced to confront his deepest rage: will he be able to move beyond the difficulties of his early years and lead a happy life, or will he take his anger toward the mainstream media out on Rocky? This book is a chronicle of deeply buried resentment and misunderstanding, unapologetic in its depiction of anti-gay sentiment and blind hate. Its numerous derogatory references to gays place the characters in a light that many readers will find solidly ignorant. However, Jean-Noel’s own struggles with infertility and his later role as a beloved “uncle” to another man’s triplets create a genuinely engaging dynamic and a compelling lead character. Why do people cling to hatred, the book seems to ask, when love often surrounds them in abundance? Dietch’s prose style is frequently cliché-ridden and clunky (“he bustled and bustled again, trying his utmost to reach his lover’s most inner genital cavity”), and the lack of more worldly, experienced viewpoint characters can make the principal players’ homophobia difficult to take. However, the novel’s exploration of small-town prejudice, along with its soap-opera–like structure of tragedy and ultimate redemption, is intriguingly original.
A family story unlike any other that unsparingly excavates the pain of small minds and inflexible traditions.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496956064
Page Count: 216
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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