Poet and novelist Kay (Creative Writing/Newcastle Univ.; The Lamplighter, 2009, etc.) recalls growing up black in a white adoptive family and the journey that reunited her with her birth parents.
Immediately after her birth in 1961, the author, the love-child of a Scottish nurse and a Nigerian student, was put up for adoption. Two Glaswegians with communist leanings, John and Helen Kay, brought her into their home a few weeks later to keep the first “coloured child” they had adopted, Maxwell, company. Despite the inevitable prejudice she encountered in her largely segregated environment, the life she shared with her unconventional “mum and dad” was happy, and she grew up comfortable in her own skin. But like most adopted children, she began to wonder about her real parents, creating elaborate fantasies about a beautiful mother who had been madly in love with a father she imagined as “a handsome cross between Paul Robeson and Nelson Mandela.” It was only after she had reached adulthood and had given birth to her own child that Kay, prompted by questions regarding her medical history, decided to track down her parents. She finally met her mother Elizabeth, a “sad and troubled figure,” in 1991. More than a decade later, through a serendipitous series of events, Kay met her father, Jonathan, an academic turned fundamentalist Christian, in Nigeria. In the comic yet wrenching first meeting that would also be their last, Jonathan ritualistically attempted to cleanse his daughter and himself of past “sins.” By turns warm, funny and tender, Kay’s story offers insight into the universal human quest for self-knowledge.
A joyful and humane exploration of the search for belonging.Pub Date: April 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-935633-34-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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