The story of communal American liberality 50 years ago and how it affected today’s world, retrieved from the files of an almost forgotten nongovernmental organization.
In 1959, many Africans and African-Americans saw their circumstances as connected, with colonialism and segregation mirroring each other. “Uhuru! Freedom Now!” was the cry in sub-Sahara Africa, and if education was the key to black freedom and independence for both populations, education in America—rather than England or the Soviet Union—was seen as crucial for Africans. The African American Students Foundation, whose founders included charismatic Kenyan activist Tom Mboya, sought to arrange transportation to the United States for young East Africans who had secured scholarships at American colleges. The organization’s first airlift brought President Obama’s father and 80 more bright, eager students from a dozen tribes. Though some were inadequately prepared for their new lives as American scholars, most succeeded remarkably, Shachtman (Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish, 2006, etc.) demonstrates in revealing character sketches. Ultimately, the students returned home to become doctors, academics and government officials in their newly formed nations. The airlift effort became a political football between Nixon and Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign, with both candidates seeking to somehow take credit for its success. Though the AASF was strongly supported by Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr., among other luminaries, raising money for the charter flights was difficult until the government took over funding the flights in 1964. Nonetheless, the efforts of the AASF proved to be a crucial element in the development of numerous students who would become significant figures in their home nations. Shachtman’s text, gleaned from the organization’s files and interviews with principals, offers a compelling portrait of nation-building abroad and nation-changing at home.
A valuable case study of the effectiveness of NGOs when they are operated with care and confidence.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-57075-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
Categories: HISTORY | MODERN | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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