Smoothly written chronicle that’s part travelogue, part contemporary relationship commentary, and all heart.
An award-winning travel writer embarks on an African expedition to prove his love.
In 2007, Smith began a monumental trek walking the length of Africa, mirroring the trail that British explorer Ewart Grogan had taken more than a century ago. Grogan’s purpose was to prove his worthiness to the stepfather of his wealthy sweetheart Gertrude, who saw him only as an unemployed university dropout. Smith’s mission was to assess the current state of Africa—and to satisfy his obsession with Grogan—and also to alleviate a few last-minute, nagging reservations about his upcoming marriage to fiancée Laura. For both men, the exhaustive march from Cape Town to Cairo offered a physical token of commitment. Smith creatively dispenses Grogan’s history—parentless by age 19, he traveled the world while harboring an obsession with Africa. In reimagining the uniqueness of Grogan’s solitary journey up the Zambezi River, Smith dexterously interweaves it with his own turbulent courtship of Laura and the life-changing odyssey he hoped would quell his feelings of ambiguity about marriage. He sought to discover “some kind of equanimity in the tangle of self-doubt and hesitation I’ve woven in my head.” The author’s troubles along his journey—a “stifling” private cabin while crossing a massive lake, flirty locals, mountain gorillas—hardly compare to Grogan’s, who had limited and comparably antiquated means to battle swarming insects, frequent fevers, parasites, malaria, larceny and cannibal tribes. Employing an affable, conversational tone and including generous photographs, Smith provides an engrossing story that runs parallel to Grogan’s history. Most impressive is the author’s stark honesty. Even after completing the 4,500-mile journey, marrying the girl of his dreams less than a month later and fathering a daughter, Smith still admits to the sadness of “old freedoms fading” and realistically ponders the longevity of true love.
Smoothly written chronicle that’s part travelogue, part contemporary relationship commentary, and all heart.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-187347-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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