A sometimes-slow but often enlightening account of teaching in East Africa.
A woman recounts her two decades dedicated to educating Massai girls in Tanzania in this debut memoir.
Many teachers have said that they learned as much from their students as their students learned from them. When the pupils are the girls of Maasailand, the lessons learned are a bit different than those gleaned by other teachers. When the 24-year-old native of Billings, Montana, arrived in the country in the late 1990s to teach at the Maasai Secondary School for Girls, Cutler met teenagers whose experiences had already included the threat of arranged marriages, early motherhood, polygamy, and genital mutilation in addition to rampant gender discrimination and severe poverty. “Helping others and empowering others are not always the same thing,” writes the author in her introduction, recalling her idealistic motivations. “Neither are simple matters, particularly for outsiders, but I didn’t know this yet. If I had, I might never have gone.” Using her own experiences as well as those of some of her students—including a teen whose father was ordered by village elders to educate one of his 23 children and a pupil who, at the age of 13, escaped an arranged marriage to a 30-year-old—Cutler presents a picture of the joys and challenges faced by this first generation of educated Maasai girls. Following her two-year stint in Tanzania, the author continued to support the school from afar for 20 years. Cutler’s prose is considered and often lyrical, as when she describes the physical conditions of the Great Rift Valley: “During the dry season, it is a dusty, radiating cauldron of cracked earth. In the wet season, it is a verdant miracle rising from the very brink of despair.” The author is sensitive to the traditions of Maasai culture but is unafraid to criticize those aspects that she feels are damaging for girls. The book is a valuable record, showing both the successes and limitations of education and Western assimilation of native cultures. At its heart, though, it is an education memoir—alternatingly moving and tedious, as they frequently are—to which anyone who has spent time in a classroom will likely relate.
A sometimes-slow but often enlightening account of teaching in East Africa.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-672-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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