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
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Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
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More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.
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The former first lady opens up about her early life, her journey to the White House, and the eight history-making years that followed.
It’s not surprising that Obama grew up a rambunctious kid with a stubborn streak and an “I’ll show you” attitude. After all, it takes a special kind of moxie to survive being the first African-American FLOTUS—and not only survive, but thrive. For eight years, we witnessed the adversity the first family had to face, and now we get to read what it was really like growing up in a working-class family on Chicago’s South Side and ending up at the world’s most famous address. As the author amply shows, her can-do attitude was daunted at times by racism, leaving her wondering if she was good enough. Nevertheless, she persisted, graduating from Chicago’s first magnet high school, Princeton, and Harvard Law School, and pursuing careers in law and the nonprofit world. With her characteristic candor and dry wit, she recounts the story of her fateful meeting with her future husband. Once they were officially a couple, her feelings for him turned into a “toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder.” But for someone with a “natural resistance to chaos,” being the wife of an ambitious politician was no small feat, and becoming a mother along the way added another layer of complexity. Throw a presidential campaign into the mix, and even the most assured woman could begin to crack under the pressure. Later, adjusting to life in the White House was a formidable challenge for the self-described “control freak”—not to mention the difficulty of sparing their daughters the ugly side of politics and preserving their privacy as much as possible. Through it all, Obama remained determined to serve with grace and help others through initiatives like the White House garden and her campaign to fight childhood obesity. And even though she deems herself “not a political person,” she shares frank thoughts about the 2016 election.
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6313-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2018
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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