Smith vivifies the personalities and marshals the revolutionary events without overwhelming the reader.
A biography shepherded by the Nelson Mandela Foundation and written by an English journalist attains distance from and clarity on the life of the near-sainted South African leader.
Sunday Times Magazine contributor Smith (One Morning in Sarajevo: 28 June 1914, 2008, etc.) works back in time from the arrest of Mandela on Aug. 5, 1962, for inciting a strike and leaving the country without a passport. With the busting of the underground headquarters of the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) the next year, his papers were discovered, implicating him in revolution and sabotage against the apartheid state, which secured his imprisonment on Robben Island for the next 26 years. In this readable, well-calibrated account of Mandela’s early life, Smith attempts to get at the making of the revolutionary and leader, from an impoverished young law student to his rise through the ANC ranks, military training and authoring of “How to Be a Good Communist.” The son of a Thembu chief who defied the white magistrate, Mandela was the first of his father’s four wives’ families to be educated. At Fort Hare University, he met his future law partner and ANC colleague, Oliver Tambo. Mandela was already proving to be a student leader and oppositional figure, and he escaped an arranged tribal marriage and met Walter Sisulu, an ANC leader, helped him find a clerkship while attending law school in Johannesburg. Mentored by Sisulu, Mandela was duly enlightened to the appalling conditions imposed on black Africans by the fiercely racist apartheid structure. Tall and handsome, Mandela was also a ladies’ man, marrying Evelyn Mase in 1944 (they had several children), before divorcing her for the much younger social worker Winnie Madikizela, in 1958. Increasing leadership in the ANC involved long absences and strains on the marriage, while Mandela was embroiled in the Treason Trial of the mid-’50s, endured a five-year ban on public speaking and schisms within the ANC and advocated armed struggle by 1961.
Smith vivifies the personalities and marshals the revolutionary events without overwhelming the reader.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-03548-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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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