by Lawrence James ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2017
An often scintillating but flawed depiction of the European domination of Africa over more than a century.
A history of “the transformation of Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when almost the entire continent became a part of Europe’s global empires.”
This is history written in the grand narrative style. James (Churchill and Empire: A Portrait of an Imperialist, 2014, etc.), a founding member of the University of York, takes on a massive subject and addresses it in sweeping, muscular prose. The author chronicles the colonization of Africa from the 1830s to the end of World War II, ending on the cusp of the era during which the reversal of these processes would begin. This is a fascinating story, and James displays solid storytelling skills. However, his perspective is thoroughly European, a view in which the vast majority of the actors are Europeans, with the Africans serving as victims, tragic but nameless. In an earlier era, the author’s approach would have been standard, and this book would have gone down as a notable epic history. However, we no longer live in that era. James is masterful in tracing the European-centered geopolitical rivalries, sketching out the leading figures in the colonial endeavor, and depicting the seemingly inexorable march toward conquest. He gracefully bounds from region to region and shows how the various processes of colonizing Africa manifested differently in different locales. He is less adept at giving life to African resistance and agency, and he occasionally resorts to anachronistic language in his description of African societies and cultures when he does address them. The bibliography also has some serious gaps—e.g., nothing by Basil Davidson or Martin Meredith. The maps at the beginning are useful, noting the boundaries of African nations and colonies in 1850, 1914, 1945, and 1990.
An often scintillating but flawed depiction of the European domination of Africa over more than a century.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-463-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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