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ALGIERS, THIRD WORLD CAPITAL

Name: ALGIERS, THIRD WORLD CAPITAL
Author: Elaine Mokhtefi
ISBN: 978-1-78873-000-6

BLACK PANTHERS, FREEDOM FIGHTERS, REVOLUTIONARIES

by Elaine Mokhtefi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2018

A firsthand account of a time when so much seemed up for grabs.

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Mokhtefi (Paris: An Illustrated History, 2002) offers a memoir of international radical activism, from helping Algeria and Africa shake the yoke of colonialism to helping the Black Panthers establish a revolutionary outpost in exile.

The narrative sometimes reads like a memoir of high society, though the glamorous names include Eldridge Cleaver (with whom the author had a close and complicated relationship), Timothy Leary, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Luc Godard, and Simone de Beauvoir. It was an era derided by Tom Wolfe as “radical chic,” when revolutionary militancy became a fashion statement and a New York girl who presented herself as innocent as well as idealistic could find herself in the center of it all. “Life was exciting and eventful,” writes Mokhtefi. “I was the fly on the window, looking in, beating its wings.” As a translator and facilitator whose adventures took her from New York to Paris to Algeria to elsewhere in Africa, the author found herself getting relationship tips from Fanon, who had asked her what she wanted; she replied, “to put my head on someone’s shoulder.” Not revolutionary enough, he responded and counseled her to “stay upright on your own two feet and keep moving forward to goals of your own.” Thus she did, though one senses that the sexual tension with Cleaver might have amounted to something if he hadn’t declared her off-limits for everyone, including himself (making her apparently the only female to whom he was attracted that he considered off-limits). Mokhtefi has mixed feelings about the man whose life he credited her with saving and whom she considered a great revolutionary leader early on. He beat his wife, he murdered a man for having a sexual relationship with his wife, and he “had a reputation for throwing fat on the fire,” taking dangerous situations and making them more dangerous. Still, “despite the things about him I despised—his killer instinct, his womanizing—I admired the man.”

A firsthand account of a time when so much seemed up for grabs.

Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-78873-000-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Verso

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
I WAS A FRENCH MUSLIM
by Mokhtar Mokhtefi ; translated by Elaine Mokhtefi

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.