by Lynne Duke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 21, 2003
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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
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