A well-wrought, inspiring tale of “change and justice” in a part of the world where they are often sorely lacking.
An impassioned tale of how an unusual Kenyan NGO became globally galvanized by the romance between its embattled Nairobi director and a resolute young Wesleyan University student.
Hailing from the Kibera slums and facing enormous obstacles, Odede managed to start the Shining Hope for Communities program, offering support to a community in crisis. Posner, an American student from a well-off Denver family, in turn became the COO of the program. The two alternate telling this uplifting and courageous story of how they met and fell in love. Odede is truly a survivor of the worst kind of marginalization of the invisible poor in the Kibera slum (“survival was improbable”). Born to an unmarried teenage woman (a breech birth, no less, one of the many miracles in his life), Odede eventually ran away from home at age 10 after being unable to stand any more abuse at the hands of his stepfather. Years of street life, theft, and drugs drove him to seek help from the white missionaries, and he eventually received the funds for an education. Posner arrived at the SHOFCO office for a Wesleyan internship in 2007, determined to brave the appalling living conditions of the slum (open sewers, rats and other vermin, scant water, complete lack of privacy) and cohabitate with Odede in disarming chastity. The authors tell a moving love story that crosses a chasm of different cultural beliefs and expectations, culminating in Odede’s refuge at Wesleyan with a full scholarship. He had to flee his country after nearly being murdered by ethnic-driven gang violence following the rigged election of President Mwai Kibaki. Aside from the authors’ developing romance, what is so impressive is Odede’s commitment to the empowerment of young women after seeing so many rapes, violence, and indignities inflicted on the women in his own family.
A well-wrought, inspiring tale of “change and justice” in a part of the world where they are often sorely lacking.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-229285-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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