Essential to students of Mandela’s political career as well as of modern African history.
A memoir of Mandela’s term as president of newly democratic South Africa.
Catapulting from prison to executive office soon after attaining freedom, Mandela (1918-2013) pledged two things: he would serve only one five-year term, as opposed to the entrenched presidents who preceded him, and he would ensure that all South African citizens were treated equally under the law. After leaving office, he began writing a memoir of his time in office, but he did not complete it. Working with his drafts, South African novelist Langa (The Lost Colours of the Chameleon, 2008, etc.) delivers a book that is less polished (because it’s told in two voices) than it would have been had Mandela finished it himself and that is a touch remote at times: “What Mandela said in the snap debate was in essence a reprise of his earlier speech in the Senate, but it was accompanied by a reminder of the fundamental goals of transition, and stressed that it was imperative that there should be a national effort to achieve those goals.” Nonetheless, it is a critically important document as the principal firsthand record of Mandela’s tumultuous time in office and the often ingenious measures he took to bring about peace. For instance, he had long steeped himself in the history and language of the Afrikaners, the Dutch-descended white settlers of South Africa who were agents of apartheid but not its authors, since the “Colour Bar was a British colonial invention.” Mandela calculated that if the Afrikaners could be persuaded to act as a bloc in support of the new democracy he headed, then “they would form the backbone of its defense.” So it was that he was able to head off a free-state movement and include Afrikaners, as well as other Europeans, in government. Though without the poetry of Mandela’s memoir Long Walk to Freedom (1994), the book contains many such practical lessons in governance.
Essential to students of Mandela’s political career as well as of modern African history.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-13471-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
