A detailed book about an extraordinary man and his belief that “only dialogue can save humanity from the perils of war.”
Berrah’s debut memoir offers a history of the struggle for self-rule by North African nations and a vision of a peaceful world.
The author began life in Aïn Beïda, a small town in Algeria, at a time when France had annexed the country. Keenly aware of the second-class status accorded native Algerians, he resented the fact that his teachers taught French history but “nothing about our Algerian heritage.” As a medical student in France, he met other Muslim students dealing with discrimination. In the early 1950s, they formed the Association of North African Muslim Students, one of numerous anti-colonial associations with which he became involved. Berrah accepted a Ministry of Health assignment in the war-torn Moroccan town of Missour, earning him praise from peers and supervisors. Later, at the University of Indiana, he made a scientific breakthrough involving the inhibition of DNA synthesis; he accepted a professorship at the Yale School of Medicine in 1963 and was elected to the New York Academy of Sciences in 1966. Feeling the need to “work for a better world,” he accepted a post as an adviser to the Foreign Ministry of Côte d’Ivoire in 1965 and became President Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s closest counselor. In the course of his career, he met with world leaders, including several American presidents, Charles De Gaulle, Fidel Castro, and Golda Meir. The memoir’s detailed, relatively dispassionate prose reflects Berrah’s commitment to diplomacy. He tells one story that effectively illustrates his creativity in that arena; he was asked at a 1973 summit of Non-Aligned Countries how to handle an inflammatory speech by Castro, in progress, which was loaded with personal insults about President Houphouët-Boigny. Berrah simply had Castro’s microphone feed cut and “pretend[ed] there was a technical problem.” Although the multitude of association names and acronyms is overwhelming at times, readers will appreciate the author’s meticulous descriptions of the places he visited; for example, he tells of how the peacocks at President Houphouët-Boigny’s palace “showed off their vivid blue bodies, radiant with emerald iridescence.”
A detailed book about an extraordinary man and his belief that “only dialogue can save humanity from the perils of war.”Pub Date: March 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-42031-8
Page Count: 644
Publisher: Dr. Ghoulem Berrah Foundation
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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