A useful hands-on resource for development visionaries.
How an unlikely 15-year partnership between an American college graduate and a South African schoolteacher created a model nonprofit to help stabilize and educate children in the poorest townships.
While working at an after-school program in the local schools as a college student during his 1998 summer break, Lief, who is now on the Clinton Global Initiative advisory board, recognized his mission to improve the lives of the impoverished children of a Port Elizabeth township. He learned about this deeply troubled landscape—still reeling from the wounds of apartheid and wracked by cyclical afflictions of “poverty, crime, bad schools, and no jobs”—from the gregarious, gracious Malizole “Banks” Gwaxula, a schoolteacher who secured the author a job at his school, the severely overcrowded and understaffed Emfundweni Primary School. The sight of children heating rocks in makeshift fires along the dirt roads at 4 a.m. in order to iron their school clothes jolted the privileged young white student. When Lief returned to the United States and graduated, he was able to convince many affluent people to help subsidize the nonprofit project he and Gwaxula called Ubuntu Education Fund (ubuntu is the concept of shared humanity that allowed Gwaxula initially to welcome the white stranger). Yet simply furnishing the school with a computer lab did not ease the essential crisis plaguing the lives of these children—namely, a very shaky family structure eviscerated by the AIDS epidemic and poverty. Thus, Lief and Gwaxula realized the need to generate more creative ideas, from building a library and teaching about health and sexual abuse to creating a community center with a theater and career and health centers. Lief's straightforward yet moving work delineates step by step how their initial good intentions became a powerful tool for transforming young lives.
A useful hands-on resource for development visionaries.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62336-449-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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