A haunting story.
Zimbabwe’s disintegration in the hands of ruthless dictator Robert Mugabe, recounted in careful, beautifully crafted prose by a journalist born and raised there.
Godwin’s powerful story combines vivid travelogue, heart-wrenching family saga and harrowing political intrigue. Mugabe’s pillaging of Zimbabwe is a crime still grossly underreported by the international press and largely ignored by the world community. It is all the more harrowing when seen through the lens of its impact on the lives of Godwin’s intrepid parents, an engineer and physician who came to Rhodesia as newlyweds. Hardly the stereotypical colonial exploiters, George and Helen Godwin helped build and nurture the country; they even applauded many of the changes that overthrew white rule and saw Zimbabwe’s transformation in 1980 into a black-governed land. But in February 2000, barbaric forces were set loose by Mugabe, a mass-murderer still viewed by many Africans as a liberator. Gangs of gun-toting looters, encouraged by Mugabe and his henchmen, plunged the country into anarchy. White-owned farms were “repossessed” by thugs who cared little about growing crops. Businesses were ransacked, often by the corrupt police force. The fragile economy was destroyed while millions starved. Hundreds of white families and black members of the political opposition were murdered in their homes. Like many of his compatriots, the author left Zimbabwe, becoming a journalist and documentary filmmaker first in England and later in America. But he returned home regularly to visit his aging, increasingly isolated and anxious parents, whose friends were steadily being killed or forced to flee. Despite Africa’s numbing violence and despair, Godwin (Mukiwa, 1996, etc.) never loses sight of the natural beauty and native spirit that drew his parents there in the first place.
A haunting story.Pub Date: April 17, 2007
ISBN: 0-316-15894-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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.
