by Sisonke Msimang ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
A candidly intimate tale of a journey toward self-identity.
An Australia-based African writer and political analyst’s memoir of a peripatetic life spent moving among countries and continents.
During her childhood in the 1970s, Zambia-born Msimang was “schooled in radical Africanist discourse.” The daughter of refugees fighting for a free South Africa, her earliest memories centered around other exiles tied to the African National Congress. Most Zambians embraced the presence of refugees, but some deemed them “rule-breakers and layabouts.” In 1981, the family moved to Kenya after Msimang’s father took a job working for a United Nations agency. A few years later, they moved to Canada, where they would finally have a chance to shed their status as refugees and seek “opportunities that accompan[ied] the terrain of citizenship and belonging.” But in white-dominated Ottawa, the family “stuck out” in ways they had not in either Zambia or Kenya. As one of just a few African families, they became subject to cross-cultural misunderstandings and targets of both overt and covert racism. Just as the teenage Msimang began to feel comfortable in her new environment, the family returned to Nairobi, where they lived an upper-middle-class lifestyle that separated them from ordinary Kenyans. In the early 1990s and not long after Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, Msimang was accepted to Macalester College in Minnesota. There, she became steeped in black radicalism and began a painful affair with a charming but “unemployed, and unemployable” black American that ended not long after the pair moved to California. The author returned to the newly liberated South Africa, where, to her surprise, she fell in love with and married a white Australian and eventually became one of many young blacks to feel betrayed by the dream of a more just and democratic society. Eloquent and affecting, Msimang’s book explores the nature of belonging as it chronicles a perpetual outsider’s quest for the meaning of home.
A candidly intimate tale of a journey toward self-identity.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64286-000-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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PROFILES
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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