A lively authorized biography of Mbongeni Ngema, creator of Sarafina! and other successful musical tales of black South African protest. Jones, former director of special projects at Lincoln Center in New York City, helped bring Ngema's play Asinamali! to New York. Her rapport with him while working on this book was such that he invited her to cowrite his new play, Magic at 4 am, scheduled for American production this year. Thus, while Jones does mention criticism of the irrepressible Ngema—rumors of a casting couch, patriarchal treatment of young actors—she aims more to place his drive and creativity in a larger context. Born in 1955, in the mostly Zulu province of Natal, Ngema came into theater through a musician buddy who employed him in a township musical he was writing. Jones describes Ngema's shifting network of friends, acquaintances, lovers, and black patrons who supported his fledgling theater work. She also threads in Ngema's growing political consciousness and his eventual connection to Johannesburg's legendary anti-apartheid Market Theatre. There, white director Barney Simon encouraged Ngema to create Woza Albert!, a musical that imagined what might happen should Jesus return to apartheid South Africa, and Asinamali!, praised by director Peter Brook for conveying the horror of black life while maintaining joie de vivre. Sarafina!, like its predecessors, was a kaleidoscopic series of tableaux; this tale of students in the 1976 Soweto uprising became an international hit. Jones steps back to describe Ngema's private life—his polygamous second marriage drew sensationalistic news coverage—and his bustling estate in a formerly whites-only suburb that reproduces a ``miniature, isolated Zulu community.'' Some references in the play excerpts deserve more explication, and the book is a bit dated; Jones could have done more to describe the debate over the future of theater in democratic South Africa. Still, a good introduction for American fans. (8 pages of b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-83619-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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