A book particularly suited for those contemplating a hitch in the Peace Corps themselves.
Former president Jimmy Carter’s grandson makes a well-meaning entry in a long-dormant genre, the Peace Corps memoir.
Thirteen-year-old Jason Carter accompanied his grandfather on a humanitarian mission to Africa in 1988 and returned with vivid, contradictory images: one of idyllic landscapes, another of children his own age pressed into military service. One of them asked whether he knew Michael Jordan: “I was shocked,” Carter writes. “Perhaps, I thought, the gap between Africa and America is not so huge as I guessed.” Fast-forward a decade, and Carter, now a young Peace Corps volunteer assigned to the northern townships of South Africa, discovers that gap to be huge indeed, at least for blacks, even under Nelson Mandela’s government. On the scene during a time of transition when that government was diligently seeking to remake itself to serve the hitherto disenfranchised majority, Carter offers a firsthand look at life in the townships, ranging from notes on matters of daily existence to larger commentaries on matters of freedom and justice. His narrative is in the main informative, though peppered with gee-whiz enthusiasms (“Hitchhiking is one of the most liberating experiences I can imagine”) and liberal posturing (“Now that we were able to point fingers at other oppressors, we were ready to hold high the banner of justice”). Carter is at his best when he lets others do the talking, as the time a weary government minister tells him that the most surprising thing he learned about taking power was that “we just had no idea how much we had to do,” or when a passer-by in a local shop comments on his globalizing mission: “Yours is the best way to colonize a people. Americans at least give you something in return.”
A book particularly suited for those contemplating a hitch in the Peace Corps themselves.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7922-8012-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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