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 book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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