Lovatt-Smith is understandably proud of her accomplishments with OAfrica, but a bit more humility would have benefitted this...
When a Vogue editor trades designer photo shoots for community development, the steep learning curve makes rich material for this memoir.
After a nomadic and sometimes-difficult childhood, first-time author Lovatt-Smith planned a trip with her daughter to Ghana to volunteer in an orphanage. What seemed like a solid plan to give her daughter some perspective and the two of them an opportunity to bond became the first step toward new lives. After five weeks at Awutiase—a run-down and crowded orphanage—Lovatt-Smith decided that she had to do more. She started her own aid organization, OAfrica, with the goal of offering orphanages assistance with modernization, staff, training and more. In her time at Awutiase, the author experienced both knee-jerk, righteous anger and the first bloom of guilt for making assumptions about best practices due to what she calls her “own poor grasp of the macroeconomics of the developing world.” She eventually learned that the orphanage directors were truly corrupt, which colored much of her experience and seems to have vindicated many of those early opinions. Still, Lovatt-Smith is willing to show that some of her assumptions were both hurtful and wrong, and she was clearly willing to learn as she went. Soon after finally establishing her own orphanage, she discovered research indicating that orphanages were not necessarily the best way to help children. By nature an impulsive woman, the author was as willing to change the direction of her organization as she was to start it in the first place. That adaptability led to OAfrica becoming an organization that tries to keep children in their families rather than one that works with group homes.
Lovatt-Smith is understandably proud of her accomplishments with OAfrica, but a bit more humility would have benefitted this memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1602862708
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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