A stark, eye-opening, and sometimes-horrifying portrait by a reporter enthralled by the “power and magic” of Africa.
A passionate debut memoir bears witness to political turmoil.
For Pulitzer Prize winner Gettleman, East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, his response to Africa was nothing less than love at first sight. Yearning to return after a summer trip, in 1992, he left Cornell University, where he was an undergraduate, for “a whole glorious year” of exploring. Naïve, enthusiastic, fearless, and woefully unprepared, he counted among his adventures nearly falling off Mount Kilimanjaro, being arrested for climbing without a permit, getting mugged, and twice losing his passport. Nevertheless, he felt sure that East Africa would become part of his life forever. The path to realizing that dream involved an internship in Ethiopia, just emerging from 30 years of civil war. The country was broken: dead animals rotted in the streets, and beggars roamed everywhere. Later, as a journalist, the author documented the atrocities of other wars: in Iraq, where the American invasion had unleashed “horrific and random and multivectored” violence; in Somalia, where America’s support of Ethiopia’s invasion, overthrowing “a popular, grassroots, and surprisingly effective Islamist administration,” led to chaos, “high-seas piracy,” terrorism, and ultimately devastating famine. Reporting from a region of 3.3 million square miles, 400 million people, and a dozen “fragile and poorly governed” countries—including the hot spots of Sudan, Uganda, Congo, Kenya, and Burundi—Gettleman focused on human rights abuses and terror resulting from conflicts among warlords, religious and ethnic factions, Western-backed rebels, and opportunistic militias “very good at murder on a shoestring.” Caught in those conflicts, he was kidnapped, imprisoned, and beaten. Gettleman is forthright about condemning American policies and U.N. failures, and he underscores his struggles to find language to convey the reality he witnessed. He haggled with his editors, for example, “over hacked versus killed, tribe versus ethnic group,” each of which “expressed value judgments or paternalism.” Besides his career, the author chronicles his long, sometimes-fraught relationship with the woman he finally married and with whom he settled in Kenya.
A stark, eye-opening, and sometimes-horrifying portrait by a reporter enthralled by the “power and magic” of Africa.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-228409-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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