Evenhanded, evocative account of distant times and places—a strong contribution to both the literature of colonialism and...
It takes a village to raise a writer. Against improbable odds, a Kenyan village raised a superb one in wa Thiong’o (English and Comparative Literature/Univ. of California, Irvine; Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, 2009, etc.).
Thanks to books by Ishmael Beah, Joseph Sebarenzi and others, readers outside Africa have a good sense of the face of modern wars on the continent. Firsthand accounts of colonial-era conflicts are fewer, which makes the author’s memoir of the Mau-Mau conflict against British rule in Kenya all the more valuable. His book opens in 1954, with hunger: “I had not had lunch that day,” he writes, “and my tummy had forgotten the porridge I had gobbled that morning before the six-mile run to…school.” When the other children unwrapped their lunches or went home for a midday meal, the author retreated into the shade to read a book, “any book, not that there were many of them, but even class notes were a welcome distraction.” The young man also had to reckon with the political consequences of having a brother who disappeared into the mountains, ghostlike, to fight the colonists. He did, however, have a healthy support system, the result of living in a household of multiple wives and many half-siblings and cousins—to say nothing of a mother who, among other things, saved him from carbon monoxide poisoning. Against this affectionate anarchy, wa Thiong’o juxtaposes encounters with colonial administrators, bureaucrats who insisted that a young native such as he use the lordly address effendi. When he did not and received a rain of blows as a consequence, readers will instantly comprehend why other young men are fighting a guerrilla war against their tormentors—and why the author’s winning of a scholarship to high school was such a triumph for himself and his family.
Evenhanded, evocative account of distant times and places—a strong contribution to both the literature of colonialism and modern African literature in English.Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-37883-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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IN THE NEWS
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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