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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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