Searing war-torn memories from a visionary African peacekeeper and women’s-rights activist.
Gbowee’s affecting memoir begins in her native Liberia in the modest settlement where she and her sisters were raised within a community “built on togetherness and sharing.” Because her parents had grown up poor, the author’s jubilant graduation from a private school in Monrovia became especially significant. In 1990, her dream of attending college to study medicine was crushed when armed rebels led by militant Charles Taylor began a destructive power struggle between the Liberian army and the nation’s indigenous people. Gunfire and bloody carnage scarred Gbowee’s adolescent memories but also sparked the beginnings of her allegiant action involving women. As the fighting subsided and Taylor acquired power, the author selflessly enrolled in social-work training programs and ultimately aided ex-child soldiers from Taylor’s army as Liberia’s Second Civil War raged. Throughout the hardship of fleeing the violence and becoming destitute with her children from an abusive relationship, Gbowee adored her sisters. This familial bond became an empowering framework of strength, support and female solidarity that the author would perpetuate through groundbreaking women’s peace-building movements and nonviolent political-activist initiatives like “Mass Action for Peace.” Gbowee stands responsible for what began as a tireless vocal demonstration and soon escalated to a standoff on the Presidential Mansion steps demanding peace. This course of action facilitated the war’s end in 2003 and the election of Africa’s first female president, and ended the author’s personal struggles with alcohol. With commanding charity, Gbowee celebrates Liberia’s eight years of peace and continues teaching young women about the power of activism.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-98429515-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beast Books
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
