A quick, inspirational story of overcoming adversity.
A touching debut memoir about a young Ugandan man who escapes poverty and becomes a mentor for others.
Katende writes that he was abandoned by his parents as an infant and spent his early years with his grandmother, wandering from village to village in search of food. To make matters worse, a terrifying insurrection against the country’s president sent them into hiding. After the war, Katende’s mother returned to live with them but then died of breast cancer in the late 1980s. The author considered ending his life with rat poison when he was in elementary school, but he didn’t have enough money to buy it. Instead, he persevered and began to excel at school and in sports. He eventually earned a scholarship to pursue an engineering degree at Kyambogo University in Kampala, Uganda. Katende credits much of his success to an accomplished soccer player and mentor he met there—Aloysius Kyazze, who fostered his Christian faith and encouraged him to play sports. In turn, the author says, he was inspired to help others succeed, and he founded SOM Chess Academy. His most notable protégé was the Ugandan chess champion Phiona Mutesi, whose story was portrayed in a 2012 book by the American journalist Tim Crothers and the 2016 Disney film Queen of Katwe. The first half of this fast-paced account includes commentary within stories of Katende’s early struggles. For example, an anecdote about his grandmother’s creative search for food is coupled with an account of chess strategy. Despite the author’s hardships throughout his life, the slim book’s tone is upbeat, and the second half—written with research partner and debut author Nathan Kiwere—presents heartfelt testimonies from Katende’s students. The author’s smooth-flowing prose is laced with poignant details; for example, in order to get hungry kids to come to the chess club, Katende says that he offered free bowls of porridge. There are several memorable people in these stories, as well, such as Sharif Wasswa Mbazira, who didn’t let severe disabilities affecting his limbs stop him from competing in chess tournaments in the United States.
A quick, inspirational story of overcoming adversity.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64146-377-5
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Made For Success Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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