An exemplary work of history and a somber account of a colonial enterprise that has crippled Africa to this day.
Fresh interpretation of the 19th-century race to colonize the interior of sub-Saharan Africa.
As Harms (History and African Studies/Yale Univ.; Africa in Global History With Sources, 2018, etc.) writes, the Congo Basin rainforest was long isolated, difficult to access, and lacking well-developed trade routes. This changed in the 19th century, when exploration on the part of explorers like Richard Francis Burton and David Livingstone was met by the arrival, in the eastern interior, of Arab and Swahili traders who took slaves and ivory to the Zanzibar coast—and then, with the assistance of Henry Morton Stanley, that of the forces of the king of Belgium, whose colonization of the Congo was among the most brutal of any in human history. The last aspect has been well documented in works such as Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, but Harms contributes significantly to the literature by explaining how these various intrusions were linked and fueled each other—and more, how Belgian colonization inspired further intrusions by other European powers. Livingstone, for example, had been traveling with those very Arab ivory and slave traders for years while the Italian-born explorer Pietro Savorgnan di Brazza pressed French claims along the Congo, helping the cause by mounting awe-inspiring fireworks shows for the local chiefs and their followers, after which he would “threaten to call war down upon them if they did not cooperate.” The stratagem was effective. The intruders, writes the author, soon become something more. They “were no longer explorers but were state builders,” states that did not have the benefit of being built with the consultation of the native peoples. Those peoples suffered and died in the spice plantations on the Indian Ocean coast, in mines, and on rubber plantations deep in the forest even as Stanley, an architect of genocide, enjoyed a funeral service in Westminster Abbey and the Zanzibari slave trader Tippu Tip became the wealthiest man in the land save for the sultan.
An exemplary work of history and a somber account of a colonial enterprise that has crippled Africa to this day.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-46-502863-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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