Unusual and highly addictive entertainment, although more cynical readers may wonder whether the author exaggerated certain...
Two wildly different cultures collide in this internationally bestselling story of a successful Swiss businesswoman who falls for a Masai warrior.
Hofmann begins with details of a vacation trip to Kenya with her then-boyfriend. Three days after they arrived, she spotted Lketinga: “A tall, dark brown beautiful man . . . more beautiful than anyone I’ve ever seen.” Back in Switzerland, Hofmann dispensed with her boyfriend, sold her clothing store and traveled back to Africa to take up a passionate relationship with Lketinga. Her prose is snappy and pointed; sentences are kept brief throughout, chapters often ending after just two or three pages. Although this clipped style can occasionally be distracting, Hofmann’s description of life in the bush with Lketinga is fascinating. The conditions in which she lived were completely alien to her, sometimes potentially life-threatening; the narrative unravels at breakneck speed in a series of visceral, pulse-racing adventures. The lovers married and struggled constantly in their attempts to understand each other. They ultimately had a child, but that seemed to drive an even greater cultural wedge between them. Hofmann shapes this linear story like a fiction narrative, complete with a “plot” containing generous lashings of romance and drama. (A German-language film adaptation premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last year.) In the end, it comes off as a cross between a wildly imagined novel and a confessional diary.
Unusual and highly addictive entertainment, although more cynical readers may wonder whether the author exaggerated certain events for dramatic effect.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-113152-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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