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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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