A neat piece of creative nonfiction. (Map, photos)
Poet Sheers, a descendant of his subject, lustrously re-creates the life of Reverend Arthur Cripps: poet, African missionary, thwarted father, a man about six leagues ahead of his European contemporaries.
Writing about “my great, great uncle . . . reflected through my imagination,” the author pays close attention to the surroundings: “the muezzin's call to pray, skittering across the sky from one of the minarets,” the coral-rag buildings of Zanzibar, the ruins of Arthur’s church, where he is buried with “a long key in the lock of his grave.” Sheers is a highly visual writer; impressions and meanings reveal themselves like the horizons of a dig. (“There were flecks of grey in his neatly-parted hair and Arthur thought again of the white brine on the black funnels, the signature of the storm.”) As the author seeks to take his relative’s measure, he finds plenty of storms: Arthur’s cherished, and pregnant, beloved’s father would not let them marry (“Think you can have your way with us, do you? Well, damn you, Mr. Cripps!”); he saw the grotesqueries of WWI as fought out in Africa; and he forever ran counter to the church and the colonial administration in the respect with which he treated the African people. Arthur opposed the hut tax and bitterly noted the “asymmetry of indulgence on behalf of the philanthropic nature of European settlement.” Ultimately he was hounded out of his official capacity, a man too appreciative of the Shona’s highly developed spiritual intelligence and the maturity of their belief system. But he returned as an independent missionary, an itinerant teacher, minister, and doctor. Sheers reveals Arthur to be a man in love with beauty, with Keats, with faith, and with the people among whom he lived and died.
A neat piece of creative nonfiction. (Map, photos)Pub Date: March 25, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-16464-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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