An often moving account of the ways we navigate our emotional and geographical landscapes.
A journalist and author from Johannesburg uses maps to retrace the boundaries of his boyhood, the dimensions of apartheid and the geography of imagination.
Gevisser, who has published previously about his native country (A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, 2009, etc.) and wrote the script for the documentary The Man Who Drove with Mandela (1999), returns with an intimate journey through his life, a journey that took a wicked detour in January 2012 when he and two close friends suffered a brutal home invasion. The author begins with some brief pages about the event, mentions it again a few times in the ensuing narrative (it swims, sharklike, just below the surface of the text), then focuses on it in a 40-page section near the end. The author, who is Jewish and gay, writes affectingly about both these aspects of his life, but it was geography, initially, that consumed him as a boy. He loved to play a self-invented game called “Dispatcher,” in which he used a map book to imagine lives and journeys; he often played for hours per day. (The game returns in the final section of his text.) Gradually, Gevisser guides us through his life—his family, schooling, travels, love of books and writing, and his dawning awareness of his sexual orientation, apartheid and danger. He includes many maps and photographs, some of which sent him into library archives. He includes accounts of his interviews with people from all walks of Johannesburg life, including a woman who guided him through the township of Alexandra. The home-invasion section is wrenching to read—though the author had the resources to visit therapists and to get away into the mountains with his partner, whom he refers to only as “C.”
An often moving account of the ways we navigate our emotional and geographical landscapes.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-17676-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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