A good read for his fans; a relic from another age for the rest of us.
The adventurous autobiography of one of the world’s most prolific and popular novelists.
South African novelist Smith (The Tiger’s Prey, 2017, etc.) has sold more than 120 million copies of his books, primarily adventure novels charged with family drama. Some of his work has been shadowed by accusations of racism and misogyny, charges the author seems to simultaneously deny and own up to in this otherwise breezy autobiography. In this chronicle of his life’s exploits, he narrates with the swagger of his heroes Hemingway and H. Rider Haggard. The book is replete with tales of hunting, flying, fishing, and near-death experiences like drinking with Lee Marvin, a star of the 1976 adaptation of Shout at the Devil (1968). The narrative is structured thematically with chapters like “This Hero’s Life,” “The High-Flying Life,” and so on, interlaced with anecdotes about his research and writing process. Smith’s depictions of the realities of apartheid-era Africa can be compelling, but his determined machismo sometimes sours the overall account. “I think one of the worst inventions of our century is political correctness,” writes the author. “It has forced a generation of men to keep their masculinity under wraps, made them too timid to admit their true views about the world.” Worse is his cantankerous scorn of the young: “We are spoiling whole generations of people now. You don’t have to work, you can claim benefits; if you want to write obscenities on the walls and go on the soccer field and swear your head off, you’re a hero.” Fans will appreciate the origins and inspirations of his popular characters, and Smith retains a mischievous sense of humor, but it’s a surprisingly unexciting memoir sporadically laced with notions best left behind.
A good read for his fans; a relic from another age for the rest of us.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4998-6124-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bonnier Zaffre
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
IN THE NEWS
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
