An exemplary work of history and a somber account of a colonial enterprise that has crippled Africa to this day.
Fresh interpretation of the 19th-century race to colonize the interior of sub-Saharan Africa.
As Harms (History and African Studies/Yale Univ.; Africa in Global History With Sources, 2018, etc.) writes, the Congo Basin rainforest was long isolated, difficult to access, and lacking well-developed trade routes. This changed in the 19th century, when exploration on the part of explorers like Richard Francis Burton and David Livingstone was met by the arrival, in the eastern interior, of Arab and Swahili traders who took slaves and ivory to the Zanzibar coast—and then, with the assistance of Henry Morton Stanley, that of the forces of the king of Belgium, whose colonization of the Congo was among the most brutal of any in human history. The last aspect has been well documented in works such as Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, but Harms contributes significantly to the literature by explaining how these various intrusions were linked and fueled each other—and more, how Belgian colonization inspired further intrusions by other European powers. Livingstone, for example, had been traveling with those very Arab ivory and slave traders for years while the Italian-born explorer Pietro Savorgnan di Brazza pressed French claims along the Congo, helping the cause by mounting awe-inspiring fireworks shows for the local chiefs and their followers, after which he would “threaten to call war down upon them if they did not cooperate.” The stratagem was effective. The intruders, writes the author, soon become something more. They “were no longer explorers but were state builders,” states that did not have the benefit of being built with the consultation of the native peoples. Those peoples suffered and died in the spice plantations on the Indian Ocean coast, in mines, and on rubber plantations deep in the forest even as Stanley, an architect of genocide, enjoyed a funeral service in Westminster Abbey and the Zanzibari slave trader Tippu Tip became the wealthiest man in the land save for the sultan.
An exemplary work of history and a somber account of a colonial enterprise that has crippled Africa to this day.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-46-502863-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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
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