An African woman's poignant and beautifully crafted memoir lyrically portrays the brutal poverty and reliance on ritual that shape the lives of her people, the Basotho. Though set in Lesotho and South Africa, hers is not a story of apartheid and racism per se, although both are a subtext of Nthunya's stories. Rather, it is a rare glimpse into the almost exclusively black African world and culture of the Basotho. It is the story of Nthunya's almost unimaginably hard life: a childhood without clothing, shoes, or food (she literally ate grass); the mother she vividly brings to life, a devout Roman Catholic who inspires her daughter's resilience and belief in God and transcendence; the death of her husband and murders of her children, brother, and father; work as a domestic to support her children. Among the most fascinating aspects of her narrative are the unbending rules of custom and ritual that determine everything from marriage to everyday activities. Yet this is not a dark book. It is filled with Nthunya's love of natural beauty, as well as her sense of humor, hope, and dreams. Nthunya's story might have been suffused with resentment and rage, but it is not. She does not dictate our emotions, but extracts them through the power of her voice. The single exception is Nthunya's warning about poverty and the jealousy it incites. In her stories she reveals how jealousy corrupts and destroys. She concludes with a warning and a dream for her people: ``Maybe if there is one day enough for the hunger to stop, we can stop being so jealous of one another. If the jealousy is no more, we can begin to have dreams for each other.'' A commanding and important work that will captivate readers with its unique voice, narrative power, and unforgettable scenes of life in southern Africa. (17 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-253-33352-0
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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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