by Melinda Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2000
A wry and engaging record, full of all those gritty details that make a place real, vivid, and not just an exotic...
A beguilingly frank and unpretentious memoir of living in Kenya that portrays both the glamorous (safaris) and the pedestrian (power outages) sides of life in Africa.
Atwood, a 30-something divorcée with a young son, caught the Africa bug on her first visit there. In 1987, drained by nursing her terminally ill mother and upset by the legal suit her brothers had filed contesting her mother’s will, she impulsively decided to return—not as a conventional tourist, but to live there. She placed her son in a boarding school and moved to Kenya. Well-to-do and independent, Atwood was able to afford such decisions, but she was also sensitive and honest: although she was able to move into a large house (rented from Kenya’s president) and did not have to work, she was well aware of the enormous disparities between whites and average Kenyans. She did her bit by employing the inevitable huge staff, feeding them and their relatives, paying for medical treatment and schooling, and (unlike many ex-pats) actually getting to know the Africans. She also put up with unreliable mail service, experienced her first taste of press censorship (if the weekly International Herald Tribune contained criticism of Kenya, for example, it was not delivered), renovated a house, ran a carpet-making business, enjoyed a safari to the desert north (which few Westerners ever visit), and fell in love. (The man was a married balloonist at a camp in the Maasai Mara, and the affair caused her more heartache than happiness.) As the years passed, she became increasingly lonely and decided in 1991 to head home—having proved her resourcefulness to her own satisfaction.
A wry and engaging record, full of all those gritty details that make a place real, vivid, and not just an exotic destination.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-879384-38-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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