A poetic memoir for horse lovers and those interested in stories of triumph over adversity.
A moving account of one family's determination to save abandoned horses, despite the dangerous war that surrounded them.
"I remember a place that was wild and filled with game…where our horses grazed contently and waited to be ridden along dusty red tracks that wound their way into the bush,” writes Retzlaff in her heartwarming memoir of life with her family in war-torn Zimbabwe. She and her husband were living their dream; they had an idyllic farm where they pushed back the bush to grow tobacco and tomatoes, raised their children and rode beautiful horses, "a place in which we wanted to invest the whole of our lives…a place for the generations to come." Then, nearly a decade later, Robert Mugabe and his armed "war veterans" violently began reclaiming the land from the Retzlaffs and their white farmer neighbors. What followed is a horrific account of survival, not only of the author’s family, but of their beloved family horses and the horses abandoned by their friends as they fled the country. Homeless, the couple risked their lives to save as many horses as they could, hiding them in barns surrounded by aggressive and armed men who thought nothing of killing the beloved animals. When even that became too dangerous, the Retzlaffs, along with over 100 horses, fled Zimbabwe for nearby Mozambique, where disaster followed them once again. Retzlaff provides readers with an intimate look at the personalities of these animals, as well as the physical and spiritual connections between each horse and rider. Intertwined with this love of animals, the author offers a behind-the-headlines view of the Zimbabwean struggle, which accentuates the true gruesomeness and folly of war.
A poetic memoir for horse lovers and those interested in stories of triumph over adversity.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-220437-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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