A convincing brief to make an honored place for this now-forgotten adventurer in both African and American history.
Novelist Kennedy (The Exes, 1998, etc.) portrays the first African-American missionary in the Congo.
Virginia-born William Henry Sheppard (1865–1927) wanted to spread the Presbyterian gospel in Africa, but only when a white man agreed to go with him would the church allow Sheppard to travel to the Congo. Of the two missionaries, however, it was Sheppard who had the longer and more distinguished career. He hunted hippos, discovered lost cities, and amassed the West’s first collection of Kuba art at the same time that he fought tropical diseases, survived many attempts on his life, and raised international awareness of Belgian atrocities in the Congo. Sheppard was a celebrity in his own time. Nicknamed “Black Livingstone” after the famous British explorer, he drew large crowds in the US to hear his tales of danger and adventure in Africa. He is mostly unknown today, partly because in 1910 he was sent home in disgrace by the Presbyterian Foreign Missions department, which according to Kennedy was as affronted by Sheppard’s advocacy of human rights as by the illegitimate African child he fathered. The author relies mainly on Sheppard’s journals and letters, as well as documents from other missionaries to tell his story. There are gaps in this material, particularly concerning Sheppard’s motivations, but Kennedy makes graceful use of her novelistic skills to imagine and fill in. (E.g., she speculates plausibly that his desire to work with the Kuba was prompted as much by erotic attraction as the desire to save souls.) Her portrait of 19th-century Africa is neither over-romanticized nor condescending, and she captures the excitement and complexities of Sheppard’s life there. Kennedy explores only gently the paradox that Sheppard was successful in the Congo, yet suffered under segregation and prejudice in the US.
A convincing brief to make an honored place for this now-forgotten adventurer in both African and American history.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03036-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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