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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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