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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
Did you like this book?
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.
11
GET IT
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
Did you like this book?
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2020 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
