A fascinating story with a tight focus, though the writing is closer to a comic book than a journalistic piece.
A concise graphic narrative of secret negotiations that helped keep the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa from becoming even more of a bloodbath.
The heroism of Nelson Mandela has earned him international renown and respect. Veteran British journalist Carlin (Chase Your Shadow: The Trials of Oscar Pistorius, 2014, etc.), who served as South African correspondent through the era depicted here, tells the story from the perspective of the other protagonist, Constand Viljoen, the general who had formerly been Mandela’s chief antagonist. Viljoen was the military chief of apartheid South Africa; in his retirement, he continued to view Mandela as a communist and the enemy of white South Africa. Yet times were changing, and the general’s brother was changing with them, advancing the argument that patriotism required serving the best interests of all South Africans, black and white. Amid the democratic reforms and Mandela’s release from prison, it was clear that the black citizens had the numbers on their side while the armed white forces retained the firepower. Viljoen had entered his retirement feeling “powerless to stop my country descending into darkness and despair.” As the struggle between black and white intensified, white nationalists implored the general to unite their factional divisions: “You are a legend in the South African military; you are the only leader capable of uniting us into one force capable of stopping Mandela.” The general believed in this mission, but his brother served as an intermediary from Mandela to arrange a meeting, where the two felt mutual respect and forged a common goal, a peaceful resolution with a government that would provide representation for both black and white. When they went public with their views, both were denounced by radicals who wanted total victory for their side, but that cost in human life would have been devastating. The general served his president and called him “the greatest of men.” Though dialogue drives the narrative, the most striking art has the fewest words, as illustrator Malet provides some historical context for the negotiations.
A fascinating story with a tight focus, though the writing is closer to a comic book than a journalistic piece.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87486-820-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Plough
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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