Apart from a few instances of schoolyard bullying and a creepy encounter with a boy cousin, there are few moments of real...
From London-based journalist Williams, an affecting memoir about growing up in two worlds, neither quite comfortable with the other.
The author was born in 1971 to a mother “from a well-heeled and titled Igbo family in Nigeria,” her father “a civil engineer from a privileged Krio family in Sierra Leone.” Neither was struggling. Yet, writes Williams, she was given up for “private fostering,” a kind of temporary adoption often used by poor immigrants seeking to establish themselves in their newfound country by working nonstop. As the narrative opens, her mother has left her with an elderly white woman named “Nanny” in a housing estate in rural Sussex and does not return for months. Months turned into years, with occasional deliverances in which her mother reclaimed her for a time, then returned her to Nanny “until she is old enough for boarding school.” Years turned into decades, and Anita-Precious Achaba, as she is known, was old enough to have a child of her own—and in so doing out of wedlock earned the ire of her mother, who warned her, “Just because you’re black, people are already making up their minds about you without even knowing what you’re capable of.” In between, Williams touches on themes that have every opportunity to come off syrupy, but she continually rescues the narrative from mawkishness. One important theme is the trope of abandonment. Another is the ineluctable sense of being different in a place in which ordinariness is a virtue—and there are degrees of difference, as when Williams describes a kindling friendship with a young neighbor across class and ethnic lines “Africans are stuck up,” her friend says, “they hate people like me. I’m Jamaican.”
Apart from a few instances of schoolyard bullying and a creepy encounter with a boy cousin, there are few moments of real drama in these pages, and yet the story moves along toward a satisfying conclusion that speaks to aspiration and desire. Well done.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59691-338-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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