Despite the relative shortness of her stint, Duke discerns some of both the truthful kernels and sweeping...
Reporter Duke, who covered Africa for the Washington Post in the 1990s, sheds her journalist’s mantle to give a personal, emotive account of those extraordinary years.
The images are familiar: the doped and deadly child soldiers; the pervasive corruption, brought to its worst heights by Mobutu; an entire continent rampant with AIDS. But Duke tells the story with vigor, and her chronicling of South Africa’s struggle for political and economic balance, its attempt to find some harmony between the African National Congress’s ideals and globalism’s reality, is a neat and idiosyncratic summation of the decade’s buffeting of that nation. She provides just enough of the surreal encounters (like the “weird Kabuki” of someone obliquely requesting a bribe) waiting in a land strange for those reared in the US, as South Africa, Angola, and the Congo certainly are, even to that rare creature, an African-American, female foreign correspondent. Duke wears her feelings on her sleeve, and they can be as conflicted as the land she is reporting on: she bemoans the absence of Western intervention in Rwanda or Zaire yet knows that such intervention never comes without strings, and she never forgets that “my people, African people, were suffering again. And [that] my people, African people, were the cause.” While she may inflate the effect her articles will have on readers (they’ll “rub people’s faces” in Africa’s travails, she says, while people really need only turn the page for her to vanish entirely), she does provide a glimpse into the shortcomings of today’s foreign correspondents whose “mission wasn’t to put down roots.” One may fairly ask how reporters can truly come to know a place when they rely on intermediaries and retreat each evening to the Intercontinental Hotel.
Despite the relative shortness of her stint, Duke discerns some of both the truthful kernels and sweeping ramifications—economic, political, social, cultural—of what independence has brought to parts of southern Africa.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50398-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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