by Lara Onegina ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 18, 2017
An enthralling remembrance of a difficult journey recounted with élan.
A businesswoman recounts her central role in the development of a Romanian gold mine in this engrossing debut memoir.
Onegina was born in New Zealand, the daughter of Romanian émigrés. Raised mainly by her grandmother, she was allowed only to socialize with Romanian children and was sent to a Romanian Saturday school. At 17, she began studying at the University of Auckland, majoring in biochemistry and biotechnology. Two years later, in 1969, she embarked for Bucharest via Belgrade (then the capital of Yugoslavia). The tenacity of the author is evident as she deals with adversity: in Belgrade, she says, she was tricked and raped by her taxi driver. Then, in Bucharest, she was arrested and jailed for remaining in the country without a visa and for selling her Western clothes to make money. After being released after 11 days and told that she couldn’t return to Romania for seven years, she set up her own New Zealand business that she calls “ScienceStaff” in the text (“the world’s first scientific recruitment agency”), which would eventually sell for NZ$1 million. In 1979, she married an insurance salesman and they returned to Romania; so begins the spellbinding tale of Onegina setting up a mining company and attempting to collaborate with a local company to mine a Transylvanian gold mine. The names of people, locations, and corporations in this memoir have been changed, the author writes. This is particularly notable when Onegina works with high-profile figures, including the future prime minister of New Zealand, whom she refers to as “Mark Spencer,” a fictitious name. If it were real, the memoir would prove to be quite an exposé due to passages such as: “[Mark] confessed that he wished he’d been born an Arab so that he could have a harem. His secret desire, he went on, was to have lots of children with many beautiful women. He admitted freely he’d had many mistresses.” This unblinking directness reflects the author’s straightforward approach throughout. Onegina rightfully rejoices in her triumphs, but she’s also unafraid to discuss her disappointments, making for a well-balanced remembrance of a remarkable life.
An enthralling remembrance of a difficult journey recounted with élan.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-0119-6
Page Count: 326
Publisher: XlibrisAU
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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