A warmly humane memoir.
An award-winning nonfiction writer’s account of the memorable year he spent living in the South African kingdom of Lesotho.
When McGrath’s cultural anthropologist wife, Ellen, suggested they move to Lesotho, a landlocked nation with the “second highest HIV prevalence rate on the planet,” he had no idea what Lesotho was or where it was located. Nevertheless, he embraced Ellen’s idea, and the pair soon moved to a remote eastern district of the country called Mokhotlong. While his wife researched “how families were adapting to the AIDS crisis,” the author took a job as a high school teacher. He soon befriended many of the district’s interesting inhabitants, including Nthabeleng, a 4-foot “tiny dynamo” of a woman who “sees all, hears all, knows all,” and Limpho, the beloved “hog-butchering librarian” who left Mokhotlong one day to quietly die in a hospital. A keen student of human behavior, McGrath took particular delight in observing the behaviors of the Basotho people. Total strangers held hands, people stared openly at foreigners out of curiosity and interest, and women nursed babies without shame in public. For one cycle of seasons following their arrival, the author and his wife immersed themselves in Basotho culture. In spring, they came as newcomers to a ruggedly beautiful, high-altitude land. By summer, they partook of community celebrations that included a pig-killing feast. That fall, they marveled at dinosaur prints left in ancient rock and witnessed how AIDS was leaving its own mark on the population, all while contemplating their new lives. They left in winter, forever changed by their experiences, with a profound connection to a place that had become their second home. Subtle, witty, and well-observed, McGrath’s narrative is a chronicle of spiritual growth and a memorable love letter to the remote African kingdom that stole his heart.
A warmly humane memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945814-62-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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