Solid background, cinematic descriptions, and the author’s own intimate knowledge of the Sudan and the international aid...
Compelling portrait of an independent-minded British aid worker who married a Sudanese warlord.
Atlanta-based journalist Scroggins, who has reported from the Sudan, uses the story of Emma McCune, a young woman with fashion-model looks who found something in African culture missing from her own life, as a through-line to follow the neglected history of Africa in the 1980s and ’90s, ravaged by famine and genocidal tribal warfare. Daughter of a colonial tea plantation executive who killed himself after repatriation from India to England, McCune became involved with African student political groups as a college student in the UK in the mid-1980s. Once in the Sudan, she proved a diligent and charismatic figure, eschewing white privileges, behaving at times more Sudanese than Western, and developing an almost cult-like following, particularly among women and children. McCune became even more of a curiosity when she married the leader of an armed Sudanese faction, Riek Machar. This marriage alienated some of her former colleagues, and much of the organizational support she had relied on diminished when she appeared to be assuming some of her husband’s political views. Bouts with malaria and dysentery took their toll on her health, and she came to desperately lack funds, but she remained capable, according to one friend, of looking smashing in a cocktail dress while dining out with other whites in Nairobi (although someone else inevitably had to pay her bill). By the time of her 1993 death in a Nairobi traffic accident at age 29, she was pregnant, optimistic, and pressing ahead with new plans to assist Sudanese women. Her story had by then attracted the interest of several reporters and film documentarians, who found her singularly intriguing, but also a tad bizarre.
Solid background, cinematic descriptions, and the author’s own intimate knowledge of the Sudan and the international aid community in Africa, enhance this profile of a woman who gave herself fully to her ideals, and to her fate.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40397-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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