Evenhanded, evocative account of distant times and places—a strong contribution to both the literature of colonialism and...
It takes a village to raise a writer. Against improbable odds, a Kenyan village raised a superb one in wa Thiong’o (English and Comparative Literature/Univ. of California, Irvine; Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, 2009, etc.).
Thanks to books by Ishmael Beah, Joseph Sebarenzi and others, readers outside Africa have a good sense of the face of modern wars on the continent. Firsthand accounts of colonial-era conflicts are fewer, which makes the author’s memoir of the Mau-Mau conflict against British rule in Kenya all the more valuable. His book opens in 1954, with hunger: “I had not had lunch that day,” he writes, “and my tummy had forgotten the porridge I had gobbled that morning before the six-mile run to…school.” When the other children unwrapped their lunches or went home for a midday meal, the author retreated into the shade to read a book, “any book, not that there were many of them, but even class notes were a welcome distraction.” The young man also had to reckon with the political consequences of having a brother who disappeared into the mountains, ghostlike, to fight the colonists. He did, however, have a healthy support system, the result of living in a household of multiple wives and many half-siblings and cousins—to say nothing of a mother who, among other things, saved him from carbon monoxide poisoning. Against this affectionate anarchy, wa Thiong’o juxtaposes encounters with colonial administrators, bureaucrats who insisted that a young native such as he use the lordly address effendi. When he did not and received a rain of blows as a consequence, readers will instantly comprehend why other young men are fighting a guerrilla war against their tormentors—and why the author’s winning of a scholarship to high school was such a triumph for himself and his family.
Evenhanded, evocative account of distant times and places—a strong contribution to both the literature of colonialism and modern African literature in English.Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-37883-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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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 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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