Densely packed research in a well-organized package.
Based on several face-to-face interviews, The Nation Southern Africa correspondent Gevisser offers a critical, fully fleshed look at former South African President Thabo Mbeki.
Mbeki grew up the son of teachers, shopkeepers and activists in Mbewuleni and was educated in England. His education in Sussex, and later at the Lenin Institute in Moscow, were sponsored by the African National Congress (ANC), under the aegis of elder Oliver Tambo. His father Govan’s political activism in the ANC had led to his arrest and imprisonment, along with Nelson Mandela, on Robben Island for more than 20 years. Mbeki and rival Chris Hani were the two youngest members of the ANC leadership working in exile at the headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia. Mbeki served as an envoy to other African countries, political secretary and propaganda chief, until the ANC leaders were allowed to return to South Africa in 1990. Mbeki’s urbane, “seductive” manner proved particularly effective in assuaging whites’ fears about black leadership and violence. Despite his ambivalence about sharing power, Mandela chose Mbeki as his deputy in 1994. Assuming the presidency in 1997, Mbeki ruled by a “workmanlike technocracy,” helping to solidify the black middle class and implement an empowering “African Renaissance.” Yet his woeful mismanagement of the AIDS crisis, advocacy of a disastrous arms deal, support for Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe and oppressive political control led to his fall from power in 2008. Gevisser skillfully examines Mbeki’s legacy within the context of a complicated, still uncertain South African history.
Densely packed research in a well-organized package.Pub Date: April 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-61100-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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