A book of many wonders, of unfathomable sadness, of intense quiet and quick violence, of greed and grandeur, of...
A wrenching, poignant portrait of Africa and Africans by a Polish journalist who first visited the continent in 1957.
Kapuscinski (Imperium, 1994, etc.) displays uncommon courage and compassion in this account of his half-century of experiences in Africa. He begins with this observation: “The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos.” Yet he succeeds. The volume has a loose chronology (starting with Ghana’s independence in the mid-1950s, ending on a dark Christmas Eve in the 1990s when a wild elephant disrupts an outdoor party), but Kapuscinski’s observations are not bound by time: He allows his prose to flow freely through decades and across boundaries of place and culture. Deftly, he employs the keen edge of anecdote to make his incisions in the ignorance and complacency of the rest of the world. He is a superior teacher. We learn about an African conception of time: “Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it.” We learn that wildlife includes not only elephants and lions (it is only the old, slow ones that will deign to eat humans) but also the myriads of plants and insects that have no names. (One night he shares a room with roaches the size of small turtles.) We see the unspeakable poverty (a woman cries in the street: someone has stolen her only possession, a bowl) and experience violence so barbarous as to make one ashamed of humanity. His chapter on Rwanda—clear, unbearable in intensity—is a small masterpiece. Kapuscinski does not neglect the beautiful, the miraculous. He describes a visit to central Ethiopia where 11 medieval churches were built below ground level. He provides lyrical descriptions of mountains and plains—and of heat so intense that it causes minds to retreat into stupor.
A book of many wonders, of unfathomable sadness, of intense quiet and quick violence, of greed and grandeur, of illuminations blindingly bright.Pub Date: April 24, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-45491-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
Duncan's second book on the Lewis and Clark expedition (Out West, 1987) is the companion volume to the newest documentary by Burns, scheduled to air on public television stations in early November. The details of one of the most remarkable official journeys in American history have been the subject of many narratives, first and most prominently Lewis and Clark's own record of the trip. Duncan provides a useful if brief overview of the expedition conceived by Thomas Jefferson, offering frequent comparisons between the largely untouched West that the expedition traversed and the same landscapes today, as well as some lively asides on later incidents along the Lewis and Clark trail. One hundred color and fifty black-and-white illustrations, including period drawings and paintings as well as modern photographs, considerably enliven the narrative. A charming if terse summary of the journey; readers wanting a detailed history should look elsewhere. (First printing of 100,000; Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-46052-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
Sketchy diary notes from Alexandra's final days of captivity will interest only experts and the most dogged devotees of the doomed Romanovs. The collapse of the Soviet Union has enabled publication, for the first time in complete form, of the final diary of Tsaritsa Alexandra, edited by two staffers of the State Archive of the Russian Federation. Alexandra's diary conveys the tightening restrictions (i.e., painted windows, less outdoor time) imposed on the Romanovs during their final months under house arrest. It also attests to her intense religious faith and her boundless love for her children, especially the tsarevitch. But its style is terse and dry; notations are mere jottings, and full sentences are rare. Helpful footnotes include biographical details, explanations of religious terms, and excerpts of other diaries. (Nicholas's diary, with its narrative drive and attention to the outside world, stands in stark contrast to his wife's inwardly turned journal.) This perfunctorily written text receives an overwritten presentation. Nicholas and Alexandra author Massie and Jonathan Brent (editor of Yale University Press), who both contribute introductions, assert that the secret significance of Alexandra's diary lies in its tedium: the tsaritsa's personal record of time, weather, Russian Orthodox holidays, and birthdays. Such details, Massie claims, record ``her symbolic accommodation of the new and her resistance to the destruction of a traditional order of thought, action, and belief.'' Brent's approach is guided by both semiotics and psychoanalysis; in Alexandra's recourse to a private language he finds ``a complicated relationship to herself.'' The implication is that one must read Alexandra's diary as a semiotic text encoding the clash between the old and new, the sacred and the profane. Readers who are inclined to accept this task will find food for thought in the tsaritsa's diary. Those skeptical about having to decode the diary's ``mute pathos and ironic witness'' will simply be bored.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-300-07212-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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