Articulates a dream and a love of Africa that makes Zimbabwe’s fate under Robert Mugabe seem all the more crueler.
Journalist St. John (Hardcore Troubadour, 2003, etc.) remembers growing up on a Rhodesian farm in the twilight of colonial Africa.
Her recollections of a mid-1970s girlhood have the engaging intimacy of Anne of Green Gables, counterpointed by the drumbeats of war in the background. Daily living was stressful for white farmers who saw the native majority’s freedom struggle as a terrorist nightmare. The author’s overprotective mother and workaholic father, a part-time soldier in the Rhodesian military forces, worked doggedly to secure Rainbow’s End Farm against an apocalypse that was, in retrospect, inevitable. Yet St. John nostalgically evokes her deep attachments to a bevy of animal companions, including a warthog named Beauty and an eight-foot python, and beautifully describes the harrowing birth during an epic African rainstorm of the stallion colt she’d wished for her entire life. Such timeless events can make politics seem trivial, if only for a moment. But less than ten pages after the colt’s arrival, the author is telling us about the .38 revolver she was given to keep in the car in case of an ambush. Her father also explained to her that landmines could be hidden under cow dung. St. John took refuge by mentally fleeing the whole situation whenever possible. Nonetheless, she was sensitive to—and portrays here in revealing detail—the nuances of manners and protocols practiced between whites and Africans, particularly as they slowly began to unravel in the ratcheting tension. Ultimately, her parents’ marriage unraveled as well. The family’s departure from Rainbow’s End when the author was 17 gives the book its heartbreaking dénouement. “In war and sometimes in marriage,” St. John reflects, “you start out on the right side, then history moves on and you’re on the wrong side.”
Articulates a dream and a love of Africa that makes Zimbabwe’s fate under Robert Mugabe seem all the more crueler.Pub Date: April 24, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-8679-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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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