An impassioned, eye-opening take on a critical African nation.
Political repression, rampant corruption, ethnic and sectarian strife, crumbling infrastructure, energy shortages, and an economy hooked on oil and mining all make Africa’s most populous country a basket case, according to this hard-hitting jeremiad.
Debut author Nwadiaru ranges through Nigeria’s history since it gained independence in 1960, finding in it a story of vast potential and natural resources that have been squandered by misrule. He gives rundowns of the many coups and military regimes that have disfigured the country, but he finds periods of elected civilian rule scarcely better; he describes President Olusegun Obasanjo, elected in 1999 after 15 years of military rule, as “the most brutal and arrogant leader Nigeria has ever had” and notes that his successor ruled Nigeria for three months from a Saudi hospital. Nwadiaru exposes the toxic political culture that underpinned these dysfunctional regimes, which included pervasive violence against opposition politicians, journalists, labor unions, human rights groups, and indigenous organizations; omnipresent corruption involving everyone from local officials to first ladies; cunning politicos who manipulated and subverted even well-intentioned leaders; and an ambient “moral laxity” he sees in Nigerian society that seems resigned to gross ethical compromises. From politics the rot has spread, he contends, giving the country bad roads, inadequate schools and health care, a skimpy and unreliable electricity supply, a steep decline in farm productivity, a dependence on royalties from an oil industry that has bred insurgency in oil-rich areas; and a moribund economy that makes talented Nigerians flee the country. Although the book could use a stronger copy edit, Nwadiaru’s prose is for the most part lucid, well-organized, and stuffed with telling details. (Occasionally, though, it bogs down in too much detail, as in a 20-page reprint of anti-corruption statutes.) The author’s anguish at the conditions in his country is palpable, but he still delivers clear analysis and measured judgments on problems and needed reforms. Americans who know Nigeria mainly for its Islamic Boko Haram terrorists and internet scams will find this book an informative guide to the country’s larger discontents.
An impassioned, eye-opening take on a critical African nation.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63268-927-6
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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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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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