An intriguing, if disjointed, guide to Ghana and to one man’s life of faith.
A memoir of an African childhood, a tourist guide to Ghana, and an inspirational Adventist tract combine in Kwarteng’s debut work of nonfiction, written with MacLaren (Faith into Miracles, 2012).
In his youth, Kwarteng lived in conditions that he modestly calls “very primitive by western standards,” in the Ashanti region of Ghana. Although he dreamed of being a postal worker, his home “was not a country where you could apply for a job, pass a test, and be accepted.” The local government, he says, provided no aid and little guidance for schoolchildren—a point for which he chides them repeatedly. His parents immigrated to America in 1996 and, years later, he was able to join them. There, he says, he was aided by his strong faith in God in achieving his dream: he became a worker for the U.S. Postal Service. “Without God,” he frequently tells readers, “there is nothing you can do on this earth.” This story of the author’s childhood in Ghana also serves as a travel manual and a grab-bag of photographs, philosophical reflections, and parables. The book’s structure, though, is curious: chapters begin in autobiography but turn into collections of self-described “random ideas.” Sometimes they’re inspirational perorations on the faith of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (of which Kwarteng is a member), but most often, he offers a travel guide to modern Ghana, briefly addressing such subtopics as Ghanaian medical care, the wisdom of retiring to that country, local currencies, and so on. The book is credited to two authors, but the text doesn’t always clarify who’s speaking. It always uses a first-person perspective, but sometimes it refers to Kwarteng in the third person. Also, the mother of Kwarteng’s children is named “Gloria” in the text, but he thanks “Maybell for giving birth to my lovely children” in the acknowledgements. Still, much of the information here is worth knowing, and Kwarteng is surely to be commended on a life well-lived and for having the courage to follow his dreams.
An intriguing, if disjointed, guide to Ghana and to one man’s life of faith.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5236-9841-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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