A convincing brief to make an honored place for this now-forgotten adventurer in both African and American history.
Novelist Kennedy (The Exes, 1998, etc.) portrays the first African-American missionary in the Congo.
Virginia-born William Henry Sheppard (1865–1927) wanted to spread the Presbyterian gospel in Africa, but only when a white man agreed to go with him would the church allow Sheppard to travel to the Congo. Of the two missionaries, however, it was Sheppard who had the longer and more distinguished career. He hunted hippos, discovered lost cities, and amassed the West’s first collection of Kuba art at the same time that he fought tropical diseases, survived many attempts on his life, and raised international awareness of Belgian atrocities in the Congo. Sheppard was a celebrity in his own time. Nicknamed “Black Livingstone” after the famous British explorer, he drew large crowds in the US to hear his tales of danger and adventure in Africa. He is mostly unknown today, partly because in 1910 he was sent home in disgrace by the Presbyterian Foreign Missions department, which according to Kennedy was as affronted by Sheppard’s advocacy of human rights as by the illegitimate African child he fathered. The author relies mainly on Sheppard’s journals and letters, as well as documents from other missionaries to tell his story. There are gaps in this material, particularly concerning Sheppard’s motivations, but Kennedy makes graceful use of her novelistic skills to imagine and fill in. (E.g., she speculates plausibly that his desire to work with the Kuba was prompted as much by erotic attraction as the desire to save souls.) Her portrait of 19th-century Africa is neither over-romanticized nor condescending, and she captures the excitement and complexities of Sheppard’s life there. Kennedy explores only gently the paradox that Sheppard was successful in the Congo, yet suffered under segregation and prejudice in the US.
A convincing brief to make an honored place for this now-forgotten adventurer in both African and American history.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03036-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
