Four decades after the imprisonment detailed here, the issues remain fresh.
A prison memoir of sorts from an activist author who maintains he has little interest in writing a prison memoir.
A prolific novelist, essayist, and academic, Kenya-born Ngugi (English and Comparative Literature/Univ. of California, Irvine; Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Memoir of a Writer's Awakening, 2016, etc.) published the original version of this material in 1982, and it focused on his imprisonment under the totalitarian regime of Jomo Kenyatta. Now, long after the Kenyatta tyranny, the author refocuses the narrative so that it is less about the specifics of abuses suffered under that regime and more about sustaining the spirit of resistance while subjected to years of incarceration. Specifically, it is about the writing of one novel, Devil on the Cross (1980), while in prison, a forbidden activity undertaken without resources and with a minimum of outside inspiration. The author wrote the book on scraps of toilet paper, drawing brief interactions with guards and fellow prisoners, typically kept isolated as another form of punishment. He had never been charged with any specific crime, but he had written plays that were deemed subversive, particularly as performed by locals within the community who had no acting experience. In his cell, he pondered the decades of struggle of African natives against colonial imperialists, “parasites in paradise,” whose inhuman mistreatment of the subjugated became the law of the land and the culture. “It was the culture of hedonism without morality,” writes the author, “a culture of legalized brutality, a racist ruling-class culture of fear, the culture of an oppressing minority desperately trying to impose total silence on a restive oppressed minority.” Within that context, he details the transformation of Kenyatta, another political prisoner, who was once hailed as the voice of the oppressed before becoming the oppressor. Newsweek dubbed the author “a naïve ideologue” while he was still in prison, but “principled” would be a more appropriate characterization.
Four decades after the imprisonment detailed here, the issues remain fresh.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-333-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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