Of interest to followers of Hofmann’s other books about Africa but not especially compelling otherwise.
The best-selling German author of The White Masai recounts her unexpected return to Africa.
In 2008, Hofmann decided it was time to put her African past behind her. Eager for a new adventure, she set out from her home in Switzerland for New Delhi. But no matter where she went in India, all she could see was her beloved Kenya. At home in Europe, Hofmann answered an ad in a magazine for a travel companion willing to travel “where the world was still wild” and discovered that trip would take her to Namibia—right back to the continent that would not leave her soul. Her expedition started in the ferociously hot savannah wilderness just outside Etosha National Park. She witnessed spectacular scenery and traveled through villages populated by the hardy Himba people, whose joyful appreciation for the little they had made her aware of the “comfortable existence” she lived in Europe. Several months after her return to Switzerland, Hofmann decided to travel back to Nairobi, where she observed the work of French charity Solidarités International and talked at length with slum dwellers who had managed to survive—and even more remarkably, to dare to dream of a better future—in the face of extreme poverty, crime and AIDS. Hofmann later returned to Kenya again with her daughter to visit the family of the Masai warrior ex-husband she had deeply loved as a young woman but from whose jealous rages she eventually fled. Narrated with genuine affection for all things African, Hofmann’s book is only somewhat interesting as a travelogue and even less so as a memoir of homecoming. The superficial treatment it offers of her own conflicted feelings toward the complex figure of her husband is disappointing and unsatisfying.
Of interest to followers of Hofmann’s other books about Africa but not especially compelling otherwise.Pub Date: July 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-908129-45-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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