A solid investigative exposé.
Slate African affairs writer Wrong considers the life of a friend who exposed a Kenyan government-corruption scandal from the inside out.
The author met 30-something John Githongo in the mid-’90s after relocating to Nairobi, where both worked as journalists. During the 2002 election, Mwai Kibaki, running on an anti-corruption platform, succeeded much-criticized outgoing President Daniel arap Moi. Kibaki appointed Githongo as Permanent Secretary in Charge of Governance and Ethics, a watchdog role that Wrong cautioned her peer could nullify his party neutrality. Though the imposing Githongo believed he was a perfect fit for the position, little more than a year passed before Wrong began receiving a barrage of messages about the enemies Githongo had accumulated. Soon after he appeared on her doorstep, desperate to resign, alleging major interadministration corruption. Accusations of complicity festered among Kenya’s political insiders, followed by a government-sanctioned manhunt. Githongo taped conversations and secured informants who fed him classified information on bribery, scams and weapons procurement. When he launched an aggressive investigation into a leasing-company contracts scandal, Justice Minister Kiraitu Murungi admitted that the company was actually a governmental operation. Wrong makes clear that whistle-blowing often results in the charge of high treason, punishable by death in Kenya. Githongo went into exile in 2005 in Britain, then rallied the media and exposed evidence of what would become known as the Anglo-Leasing scandal. In a well-rounded approach, Wrong dispatches details on her parents’ genealogies and worldviews, Githongo’s heritage and an extensive discussion of Kenyan government, demographics and the multifarious history of corruption under both the Moi and Kibaki administrations.
A solid investigative exposé.Pub Date: June 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-134658-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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