Empathetic, compelling narratives from a part of the world too often overlooked.
The story of an American journalist’s experiences with extraordinary women in West Africa.
When Searcey was appointed West Africa bureau chief for the New York Times and moved to Dakar, Senegal, she knew there would be both personal and work-related hardships. What she didn’t fully anticipate was learning the true extent of the atrocities the women she interviewed had endured. In this revealing, sometimes heartbreaking memoir, the author shares the stories of the women she met. As she notes, these accounts never made it into the newspaper, or if they did, they didn’t receive the amount of attention they deserved because Donald Trump and the roiling political situation in the U.S. consumed most of the available space. Here are tales of violence and heroism as women and girls were kidnapped by the militant group Boko Haram, raped and/or forced to marry older militants, and ordered to serve as suicide bombers. With tremendous courage and a strong will to live, these women disobeyed orders; remarkably, they are able to talk about the many seemingly insurmountable obstacles they have faced. Searcey also discusses the more well-known Chibok girls and her attempts to interview and photograph them, which proved to be a lesson in patience and persistence. She balances her tales of work with those of being a mother and wife and the strains and struggles placed on both she and her husband as they pursued life in a foreign country. The author demonstrates her journalistic skills by providing ample pertinent details to flesh out each chapter, centered around a different interviewee. As a mother and woman, she gives an honest account of her personal experiences. The combination is powerful and moving and brings much-needed attention to the plight of these women. For further difficult yet important reading on this topic, see Wolfgang Bauer’s Stolen Girls (2017) and Helen Habila’s The Chibok Girls (2016).
Empathetic, compelling narratives from a part of the world too often overlooked.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-399-17985-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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