An African woman's poignant and beautifully crafted memoir lyrically portrays the brutal poverty and reliance on ritual that shape the lives of her people, the Basotho. Though set in Lesotho and South Africa, hers is not a story of apartheid and racism per se, although both are a subtext of Nthunya's stories. Rather, it is a rare glimpse into the almost exclusively black African world and culture of the Basotho. It is the story of Nthunya's almost unimaginably hard life: a childhood without clothing, shoes, or food (she literally ate grass); the mother she vividly brings to life, a devout Roman Catholic who inspires her daughter's resilience and belief in God and transcendence; the death of her husband and murders of her children, brother, and father; work as a domestic to support her children. Among the most fascinating aspects of her narrative are the unbending rules of custom and ritual that determine everything from marriage to everyday activities. Yet this is not a dark book. It is filled with Nthunya's love of natural beauty, as well as her sense of humor, hope, and dreams. Nthunya's story might have been suffused with resentment and rage, but it is not. She does not dictate our emotions, but extracts them through the power of her voice. The single exception is Nthunya's warning about poverty and the jealousy it incites. In her stories she reveals how jealousy corrupts and destroys. She concludes with a warning and a dream for her people: ``Maybe if there is one day enough for the hunger to stop, we can stop being so jealous of one another. If the jealousy is no more, we can begin to have dreams for each other.'' A commanding and important work that will captivate readers with its unique voice, narrative power, and unforgettable scenes of life in southern Africa. (17 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-253-33352-0
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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