In this warm tribute, la Grange testifies to Mandela’s charm and charisma and the profound changes he effected in her own...
A loving portrait of Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) by a devoted assistant.
For 18 years, la Grange worked for Nelson Mandela, rising from typist to private secretary and finally to manager and spokesperson for his office. In this debut memoir, she recounts her stressful, demanding career as one of Mandela’s closest aides. It was an unlikely position for a white South African who was raised to hate and fear black people. “No person is born a racist,” she writes. “You become a racist by influences around you. And I had become a racist by the time I was thirteen years old.” Mandela, though, transformed her: He was a man, she attests, of unimpeachable integrity, humanity and kindness. Seeking no honors for himself, he worked tirelessly on issues of health, freedom and peace. In his 70s when she joined his staff, he treated her like a cherished granddaughter; she called him Khulu, or grandfather. The author chronicles Mandela’s whirlwind travels to raise funds for his three foundations and to fulfill countless invitations. He had become, the author writes, “the savior of everything and everybody.” In the course of those travels, la Grange met world leaders (the Clintons get special praise), movie stars (she was thrilled to meet Hugh Grant) and celebrity activists (Bono, for one, was much respected by Mandela). Part of her job was to protect Mandela from an onslaught of people requesting his help and from the relentless media. Although she writes that this is “not a tell-all book,” nor “a book of great political insights,” the author does expose vicious conflicts within Mandela’s family. Some relatives resented her and ordered her to stay out of Mandela’s personal life, but she could not help but run to his side when he called for his “Zeldina.”
In this warm tribute, la Grange testifies to Mandela’s charm and charisma and the profound changes he effected in her own life.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0525428282
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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SEEN & HEARD
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
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