Tender, romantic recollections interlaced with a biting appraisal of apartheid.
In Bismillah’s debut memoir, she discusses growing up in South Africa under apartheid, encountering prejudice toward mixed-race relationships, and escaping oppression through immigration.
“This multi-hued society” of South Africa “should have adopted the quagga, that extinct beast with its varicoloured body, as an emblem for the country,” writes the author. In this book, Bismillah looks back on a life affected by racial segregation, and her remembrance has a sense of urgency: “Alzheimer’s, lurking in a recess of my brain, threatened to distort my recollections to a deconstructed, Picasso-like abstraction,” she discloses. She was born in Johannesburg in 1928 to an Italian father and a mother of “Scottish and Anglo-Indian descent.” Her family was considered privileged, but her formative years were by no means sheltered; she was raised by a tyrannical grandmother with Victorian values, her mother died during her childhood, her father was severely wounded during World War II, and her brother was killed in a car accident. Her life changed again in nursing school, where she met Abdul Haq “Bis” Bismillah, an Indian medical student and the man she would later marry. Their relationship faced ugly prejudice in South Africa, and they escaped to raise a family, first in London, England, then in Fergus, Ontario. Bismillah’s prose is characterized by elegant, vivid flourishes; for example, she discusses how “pictures of places and people, both living and dead, tumbled like acrobats across the screen of my mind.” Of a date in Johannesburg with Bis, she writes, “I recall the susurrus breeze that rustled through the branches…and the chirping cicada’s nocturnal song to the accompaniment of Debussy’s hauntingly beautiful and melodic ‘Clair de Lune’ over on the radio.” Along with evocative imagery, the memoir presents an enduring message about racial awareness. At one point, the author recounts how Bis described South Africa’s train carriages: “second-class…reserved for Indians…and third class with its un-upholstered and bare wooden seats for black people.” As a European always traveling first class, she says, she’d never encountered such discrimination before. Overall, this is a historically rich chronicle of 20th-century South Africa by an inspirational woman.
Tender, romantic recollections interlaced with a biting appraisal of apartheid.Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-3176-7
Page Count: 396
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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