by Pamela Nomvete ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 27, 2012
Nomvete’s willingness to unveil her affecting story makes for a moving read that will instill hope and inspiration.
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Nomvete’s debut memoir recounts her struggle to find herself.
As a child, Nomvete’s activist parents were exiled from their native South Africa, and the author spent her childhood in other African countries and England. With the end of apartheid, she returned to her homeland to vote and ended up staying. Already a successful stage actress in England, she had no trouble landing work in South Africa, and she soon starred on the popular South African soap opera Generations. She became a celebrity, but the fame was difficult to handle. She found herself hiding in her home, and she sought solace in alcohol and cigarettes as well as the toxic relationships to which she seemed drawn. Though her work allowed her to meet and talk with both Nelson and Winnie Mandela, her personal life continued to unravel. She eventually left the soap opera while her own life took on its own soap opera–like quality. At her lowest point, she was living in her car and begging people for money. Her honest, unflinching memoir is told in a clear and readable style with poetic touches: “Idyllic. That is definitely how I would describe my childhood. Idyllic.” It mostly focuses on the time she spent in South Africa, and she describes in great detail her life as a successful actress. But there’s a bitter undercurrent when she recalls incidents where she felt that South African performers were not treated with the same respect as those from other countries: For instance, some performers were excluded from the VIP room at a function in a South African historical venue where Nelson Mandela was scheduled to appear, or the fact that she had to travel via a hot, uncomfortable bus to a foreign-film festival. She’s critical of the mistakes she made in her personal life, while she also attempts to justify some of the reasons behind her making such poor decisions. In recounting her own experiences, Nomvete also looks at some of the changes in the “new” South Africa, pointing out improvements but more often highlighting areas that still need to be addressed, such as the nation’s widespread poverty.
Nomvete’s willingness to unveil her affecting story makes for a moving read that will instill hope and inspiration.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477243251
Page Count: 198
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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