Nevertheless, it’s a remarkably unusual career, adequately presented.
A San Francisco–based international private eye pokes around the exotic dangers of contemporary Africa.
James specializes in missing-person searches and accident investigation in parts of the world where male gumshoes hesitate to tread. Her memoir consists of four adventure narratives with traces of colonialist tensions, in that James’s clients are boorish Europeans or Americans, but her sympathies lie with the Africans. “Detour” resembles a traditional locked-room whodunit: James unravels a coffee-plantation owner’s alleged suicide in Kenya, first suspecting her piggish stepson, then discovering that an African friend aided the suicide to end her suffering from AIDS. “Gorillas and Banana Beer” presents a grim aspect of the continuing Rwandan turmoil as James shepherds a bratty American teen (whose businessman father sent him to Africa for a tough-love awakening) on an unsanctioned attempt to view rare mountain gorillas that goes very wrong when they encounter venal trackers, murderous poachers, and enigmatic Watusi tribesmen. The author indicts obsessive eco-tourism, yet she seems driven by the same reckless impulses. In the exciting if melodramatic “Biera,” James enters a war-torn Mozambique port aboard a rogue South African trader and in the midst of chaos improbably reunites another anguished charge with his long-vanished mother. These African adventures culminate in the grueling “Witchdoctor.” A reckless employer sends James to find Kali, a Turkana woman who got a Western medical education, then vanished while doing research among her tribe, which regarded her as a witchdoctor. Encumbered by a grating British psychologist also looking for Kali, James is nearly killed by attacking tribesmen, then saved by the Turkanas, who themselves persevere under such appalling circumstances that the PI and the psychologist are nearly dead when found by a Kenyan ranger. Overall, James clearly depicts unusual environments and vividly captures the nitty-gritty process of surviving in contemporary Africa. Unfortunately, her engrossing stories are hobbled by turgid, repetitive prose.
Nevertheless, it’s a remarkably unusual career, adequately presented.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018627-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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