A candidly intimate tale of a journey toward self-identity.
An Australia-based African writer and political analyst’s memoir of a peripatetic life spent moving among countries and continents.
During her childhood in the 1970s, Zambia-born Msimang was “schooled in radical Africanist discourse.” The daughter of refugees fighting for a free South Africa, her earliest memories centered around other exiles tied to the African National Congress. Most Zambians embraced the presence of refugees, but some deemed them “rule-breakers and layabouts.” In 1981, the family moved to Kenya after Msimang’s father took a job working for a United Nations agency. A few years later, they moved to Canada, where they would finally have a chance to shed their status as refugees and seek “opportunities that accompan[ied] the terrain of citizenship and belonging.” But in white-dominated Ottawa, the family “stuck out” in ways they had not in either Zambia or Kenya. As one of just a few African families, they became subject to cross-cultural misunderstandings and targets of both overt and covert racism. Just as the teenage Msimang began to feel comfortable in her new environment, the family returned to Nairobi, where they lived an upper-middle-class lifestyle that separated them from ordinary Kenyans. In the early 1990s and not long after Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, Msimang was accepted to Macalester College in Minnesota. There, she became steeped in black radicalism and began a painful affair with a charming but “unemployed, and unemployable” black American that ended not long after the pair moved to California. The author returned to the newly liberated South Africa, where, to her surprise, she fell in love with and married a white Australian and eventually became one of many young blacks to feel betrayed by the dream of a more just and democratic society. Eloquent and affecting, Msimang’s book explores the nature of belonging as it chronicles a perpetual outsider’s quest for the meaning of home.
A candidly intimate tale of a journey toward self-identity.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64286-000-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
PROFILES
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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