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
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
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