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. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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