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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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