A Nigerian man explains how and why he moved to the United States.
Growing up in Nigeria, one of Ndibe's (Arrows of Rain, 2015, etc.) greatest dreams was to live in America. So when Chinua Achebe offered him the job of founding editor of African Commentary magazine, a position based in the U.S., Ndibe didn't hesitate to accept. With impressive storytelling skills, the author explores his Nigerian childhood, his dreams and fears, and his arrival in the U.S. during a typical New York City winter, which he “strained to find the language” to describe, eventually settling on “akin to living inside a refrigerator.” Initially, the author focuses on his first few weeks in America and then expands to encompass the many years he's lived in the country. He discusses his introduction to American culture and the variety of differences between Nigerian and American society, including how people pay for meals and when they can and cannot visit. He writes about a racial profiling episode that happened between him and a NYPD officer shortly after his arrival in the country (the officer claimed he fit the description of a bank robber), the death of his father and the British man who had been his father's lifetime friend, the day he became a U.S. citizen, and the details of how he met his wife. Ndibe also integrates amusing moments—e.g., the mix-up that his first name, Okey, caused—within his reflections on becoming a writer and attending a master’s of fine arts program where he met and worked with a number of distinguished authors. On the whole, these intriguing essays give readers a unique perspective on the U.S. and provide an inside look into Nigerian culture and traditions.
A diverse and entertaining set of memories on how a Nigerian man became an American.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61695-760-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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 19, 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 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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