A pleasure to read, and just the thing to give to a disaffected teenager of a creative bent.
London-based visual artist Kambalu turns in a lively, funny memoir of growing up alternately poor and privileged in Africa.
Born in 1975 in Malawi, a time when the president-for-life’s government was turning ugly, Kambalu grew up under the tutelage of his father, a nattily dressed clinician who read Nietzsche on the toilet and dispensed philosophy along with pills. “We had called him the Jive Talker,” Kambalu writes, “not because he lied or talked jive, but because he liked to keep us awake on random nights and inflict his Nietzsche and personal affirmations on us in drunken performances, which he called jive, named after his favourite beer, Carlsberg Brown, which he also called jive.” The Jive Talker earned a good living, but the belt tightened when he was reassigned to a desk job away from the medicine cabinet. Meanwhile, young Kambalu, a superman in the making with an almost preternatural calmness about him—his birth name, after all, translates to “Don’t worry, be happy,” which disposed him to a liking for spiritual master Meher Baba—enjoyed a sentimental education with the Jive Talker before being carted off to prep school. There he added more whimsy to his arsenal, for, as he writes, “Most of [the] teachers were raving eccentrics but I guess you had to be out of your mind to teach in Malawi.” Convinced that he is owed a future as a rock star, Kambalu insinuated himself into a band, learned to play some guitar chords and crafted a fine sound, at least to his own satisfaction. Once old enough to do so, he crossed the border into a South Africa newly liberated from apartheid, where he attempted to convince record-company agents that he was the next big hit. As we leave him, returned to a finally democratic Malawi, we know that he won’t be his country’s answer to Michael Jackson, as he had hoped—but we also know that good things are going to happen to him.
A pleasure to read, and just the thing to give to a disaffected teenager of a creative bent.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5931-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
A superb dual portrait of the 32nd President and his First Lady, whose extraordinary partnership steered the nation through the perilous WW II years. In the period covered by this biography, 1940 through Franklin's death in 1949, FDR was elected to unprecedented third and fourth terms and nudged the country away from isolationism into war. It is by now a given that Eleanor was not only an indispensable adviser to this ebullient, masterful statesman, but a political force in her own right. More than most recent historians, however, Goodwin (The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, 1987) is uncommonly sensitive to their complex relationship's shifting undercurrents, which ranged from deep mutual respect to lingering alienation caused by FDR's infidelity. One element creating tension was tactical politics: FDR, seeing increased arms production as crucial to the war effort, sought to close the divide between businessmen and his administration, while Eleanor prodded him not to forget about labor, civil rights, and Jewish refugees. As grateful as he was to her for acting as his political eyes and ears, Franklin also could react testily to her unremitting lobbying at times when he desperately needed relief from the strains of running the war effort. Equally fascinating here are the often semi-permanent White House guests who filled the couple's "untended needs": their daughter and four sons; FDR alter ego Harry Hopkins, shaking off grave illness to go on critical diplomatic missions; Franklin's secretary Missy LeHand, prevented by a stroke from serving the man she loved; exiled Princess Martha of Norway, who gave Franklin the unqualified affection of which Eleanor was incapable; two of Eleanor's confidantes, future biographer Joe Lash and the lesbian ex-journalist Lorena Hickok; and Winston Churchill. A moving drama of patchwork intimacy in the White House, played out against the sweeping tableau of the nation rallying behind a great crusade.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-64240-5
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Though not in a league with those of Coleridge or Joyce, Greene's dreams compose an alternate autobiography of his private self in matter-of-factly unreal vignettes. Culled from the thick journals of his dreams that Greene (The Last Word, 1991, etc.) obsessively kept in his vigorous old age, and posthumously published in accordance with his expressed wish, this slim volume catalogs his adventures and escapades in what he called "My Own World," as opposed the shared reality of "The Common World." In these dreams, his encounters with the famous — Khrushchev, Edward Heath, Queen Elizabeth — often seem dull and ordinary; his travels possess only recycled verisimilitude compared to the Haiti, Vietnam, and Cuba we see in his novels; and his literary reveries betray an innocent craving for approval from the likes of Cocteau, D.H. Lawrence, and Sartre. The most curious and intriguing dreams magnify Greene's fantastic side and combine it with an uncharacteristically carefree humor. Those in which he is a criminal or a spy (in one, assigned to assassinate Goebbels with poisoned second-hand cigarette smoke) seem to parody his own semi-parodic thrillers. Some of the more surreal literary vignettes — a trip on a South American riverboat with Henry James; a guerrilla campaign with Evelyn Waugh against W.H. Auden — are hilarious pulp belles lettres. Larger issues of religion and imagination, however, are less amplified here than in his waking corpus and are typically reduced to altercations with sloppy priests or comments about the neurotic drudgery of producing books. The few brief examples of dream-inspiration and theophany are unsatisfactorily developed and give no real clue to his creative process or religious life. A uniquely candid self-portrait, but Greene's inner world only adumbrates his real-world exploits and the world he consciously created in his fiction.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85279-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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