Thoroughly researched, passionately written, deeply disturbing. (1 map, 2 charts, 8 pages b&w photos)
Indefatigable Dutch sociologist De Witte (Crisis in Kongo, not reviewed) examines the murder of Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba and unearths a sordid story of corruption, violence, conspiracies, and lies.
On January 17, 1961, former Prime Minister Lumumba and two of his associates were murdered by firing squads in a remote clearing. Shortly afterwards, their remains were moved, then exhumed a few days later. This time, the perpetrators, desperate to cover their trails, dismembered the bodies, submerging them in sulfuric acid. Even this was insufficient, so the remains of the remains were burned, and those stubborn fragments that refused to disappear were scattered across the countryside. Lumumba had been captured by his political enemies on December 1, 1960, days after escaping from house arrest; he was then subjected to many days of beatings and other humiliations (among the most disturbing of which was his being forced to swallow hair ripped from his own face and head). De Witte’s conclusion is blunt: “It was Belgian advice, Belgian orders and finally Belgian hands that killed Lumumba on 17 January 1961.” The author has examined documentary evidence at the United Nations, in Belgian archives, and in Africa, and he argues that Lumumba’s assassination resulted from the fear of the Belgians (and of other Western countries, especially the US, just then reeling from its problems with Castro) that Lumumba—a popular politician—would so animate the people that they would expel rather than accommodate the business interests in the country. De Witte shows with devastating clarity how the UN and the West portrayed Lumumba as a danger (comparisons to Hitler were made), how the eight Belgian soldiers and nine policemen shot him (and received bonuses in their next paychecks!), how the government concocted lies about an escape attempt and denied responsibility for his death. His research has left him deeply cynical, as revealed in his declaration that governments espouse humanitarian and ethical principles only when they serve political objectives.
Thoroughly researched, passionately written, deeply disturbing. (1 map, 2 charts, 8 pages b&w photos)Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-85984-618-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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