Cut from the scaffold, Saro-Wiwa was canonized—“a man whom few people had heard of twenty-four hours earlier was suddenly...
A biography of the late Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, a man as personally complex as he was politically elemental.
“Where does his life end and where do I begin,” wonders Ken Wiwa, whose father was executed by the Nigerian military regime in 1995 on flimsy charges that he was involved in the deaths of four Ogoni chiefs. What is clear is that the military was happy to be rid of a vibrant critic, but killing Saro-Wiwa turned him into a martyr and a myth—an important symbol for the Nigerian opposition, although a difficult one for his son to come to terms with. In this inquiring biography, Wiwa reexamines his and his father’s lives, poring over the intersections and near-misses, resentful of the complicated legacy, the atoning for his father’s sins, justly proud of his principles. Wiwa handles plenty of confusion and guilt with aplomb as he unravels an irascible, emotionally demanding, and domineering father, yet also a man who called the military, corrupt businessmen, and greedy multinationals (the “lootocracy”) to task for their wanton despoliation of Nigeria—a country massively rich in resources that nonetheless owes billions in external debt, has a prehistoric infrastructure, underfunded schools, high infant mortality, low life expectancy, and hospitals “best described as mortuaries.” Saro-Wiwa made a lot of enemies through his writings and organizing, and they killed him. Wiwa’s childhood recollections are ambivalent: he describes his nervousness and self-consciousness around his father, his sense of always trailing in his footsteps (which meant he never, ever caught up). Until this biography, that is—its voice very much his own, as is its political verve. Insightful chapters on the children of Nelson Mandela and Stephen Biko add poignancy and depth to Wiwa’s personal exploration.
Cut from the scaffold, Saro-Wiwa was canonized—“a man whom few people had heard of twenty-four hours earlier was suddenly invested with mythic qualities.”Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58642-025-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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