An inspiring story of a young man determined to excel and escape.
Kenyan writer and professor wa Thiong’o (English and Comparative Literature/Univ. of California, Irvine) offers a second harrowing volume of memoir, a sequel to his Dreams in a Time of War (2010).
The author begins in 1955, when he had just completed his first term of boarding school and returned home to find…no home. His village was destroyed, and his family was relocated. Right from the outset, then, the themes of dislocation, fear and random violence and terror emerge. His older brother sided with the anti-colonials and was eventually captured, then released; the author was imprisoned, not long after his graduation—a random detention that culminated in the 1959 trial that concludes this book. Wa Thiong’o highlights his family and friends, but also the dominant presence of the school principal, Edward Carey Francis, who appears as a strong, principled but enormously complex character whom the author both feared and revered. School became a revelation, as the author plunged into the library, reading indiscriminately at first (he loved Sherlock Holmes, was troubled by the literature of empire). Excelling in the classroom, he submitted a story for publication in the school journal (it was accepted), and he participated in the school’s annual Shakespeare production. The author also writes about his dawning spiritual and religious life (he became an extraordinarily devout Christian, then began to question) and about his ineptness at sports. He preferred table tennis and chess to soccer and field hockey. Throughout, he fittingly refers to school as his “sanctuary,” for the place shielded him from the Mau Mau Uprising and other regional and continental crises.
An inspiring story of a young man determined to excel and escape.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-90769-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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 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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