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 well-written, matter-of-fact account about a vanished hand-to-mouth occupation.
A memoir of driving new cars and trucks from Detroit for delivery in Los Angeles over a nine-year span, 1949-58.
Born in 1928, Browning grew up in a middle-class Ohio family but found college unappealing and found little to love in the U.S. Navy. A newspaper advertisement caught his attention: "Cars delivered, drivers wanted." He showed up at the Detroit address, and immediately began working for the owner of the driveaway business, identified only as the Old Man. Browning normally found himself driving in a convoy, allowing him to become acquainted with other restless men. Their route from Detroit to Los Angeles before the completion of the interstate highway system took them mostly through small-town America. Some of the men signed up for round trips; others asked for one-way journeys only. The drivers usually punctuated their overnight stays in cheap motels with eating, drinking, shooting pool and seeking sex, finding willing women from time to time. The narrative and the dialogue are often raunchy; Browning certainly doesn't sugarcoat the raucousness or rootlessness of the life. "On paper, it looked as if no one would ever take a job like that," Browning says. "In practice, there were a dozen applicants for every position. For the wanderers and ne'er-do-wells the job was made to order: the first deal they had ever run across that actually paid them for indulging their natural bent—flitting back and forth across the country, just knocking around."
A well-written, matter-of-fact account about a vanished hand-to-mouth occupation.Pub Date: March 20, 2003
ISBN: 0-944220-15-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A laudable, if cautious, attempt to reclaim the literary status of an important American author from successive waves of neglect and politically charged reinterpretation. Placing Jewett firmly within the pantheon of late 19th century intellectual society, Blanchard (Margaret Fuller, 1978) blends biography and textual analysis to reveal a life of apparently astonishing balance. Born in 1849 in the comfortable and bucolic town of South Berwick, Maine, the daughter of a broad-minded physician, Jewett managed the difficult feat, notes Blanchard, of gaining fame and fortune ``simply by going her own way and doing what she liked to do.'' Although she was past 40 when her most enduring work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, appeared, Jewett, despite crippling bouts of rheumatoid arthritis, began publishing in her teens. At 32 she established her extraordinarily successful liaison with Annie Fields, widow of publisher and Atlantic Monthly founder James T. Fields, and thereafter shuttled happily between her beloved Maine and the highbrow salons of Boston. While giving ample play to Jewett's singular achievement of creating a life and art that constantly sustained and reflected her intellectual and spiritual interests, Blanchard, in her meticulous portrayal of the world of educated 19th-century women, skillfully demonstrates how unexceptional her subject's life appeared within its heady environs. Similarly, her probably asexual relationship with Fields, seen by many as ``perhaps the classic `Boston marriage,' '' was unremarkable in an era of flowery ``romantic friendships'' between accomplished, independent women who rarely had the option of combining work and family. By the same token, Jewett's literary themes—notably the importance of community, a Transcendentalist reverence for nature, and a realism leavened by optimism—were addressed to and embraced by readers of both sexes. Persuasively argued, this spirited work falters only in its failure to measure Jewett's achievements against the best, rather than the whole, literature of her time.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-51810-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
