More a harrowing memoir than a travelogue on the beauty of Africa.
A Canadian divorcee packs up her family and moves to Africa.
This autobiographical tale of life in Africa begins when the author (formerly known as J.R. Donnell) applies for a teaching job in one of the most stable African countries, Kenya, and arrives there in January 1972 with her four children: Jaden, 14, Scott, 12, Rick, 11 and her youngest Tina, eight. Bureaucratic problems begin at the Nairobi airport and continue when Donnell’s promised teaching job does not materialize. Her Kenyan friend from Canada, who helped her apply for the job, provides her with a house on his brother’s farm while she searches for work. The author’s landlord makes sexual advances, Jaden contracts malaria and their pets are killed off as the family struggles to adapt to the beautiful but harshly unfamiliar world in which they now live. Engrossing, though often repetitive, descriptions of their difficult and dangerous everyday lives keep the reader engaged as the Donnells fall in and out of trouble. The naïve author must fight off unwelcome sexual advances from those she thought were her friends, and the only person she trusts is Mark Kibira, a Kenyan with whom she’s having an affair. Mark is from a wealthy family and helps Jerry buy native products to export to her uncle in Canada, who in turn promises to sell them in his store. A series of rented houses provide a home for the family, but the children are only intermittently in school and often left to their own devices. While the author and Mark travel the country looking for items to export, Jaden narrowly escapes an attempted rape. Donnell accepts a marriage proposal from the often-unreliable Mark, and as her first year in Kenya draws to an end, the marriage is in trouble, her uncle is refusing to handle her first shipment of goods and Jaden, who has returned to Canada, is pregnant. Despite redundancies, the amusing and terrifying anecdotes in the book make for an absorbing story.
More a harrowing memoir than a travelogue on the beauty of Africa.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4196-8027-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
