Difficult but necessary reading.
A Namibian woman’s account of how she survived being kidnapped and forced into a global human trafficking network.
When one of Tjipombo’s father’s wives accused Tjipombo’s mother of witchcraft, both were exiled to another village for one year to allow family “tensions to ease.” They stayed with her uncle, Gerson, whose lively household the author came to love. Then a business deal involving Tjipombo’s father and an associate of one of Gerson’s business contacts went sour, and Tjipombo (a pseudonym) was unexpectedly called upon to serve as the contact’s house girl for one year. The author soon discovered that the man actually wanted her for a prostitution ring that extended across southern Africa. A witch doctor subjected her to a bloody ceremony to mark her as his “daughter.” If she tried to escape, she or members of her family would die. Herded with other captive women into trucks, Tjipombo was sent to a camp where middlemen from China abused and raped her. From there, she was put on another truck that stopped in the Sudan. There, she became a servant and sexual slave for members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and visiting Sudanese government officials. An escape attempt landed her back in the hands of the traffickers who had originally captured her. The men put her on a ship bound for Dubai, where she became the live-in servant for a rich, powerful family. Her life “consisted of little beyond sleep and work,” until one family member called the Jackal forced her into an international sex slave “harem” the family used to entertain visiting officials. Tjipombo finally escaped after she stole the cellphone of a high-ranking American official who had made cellphone videos of their sexual encounter and threatened to blackmail him. In this harrowing, unsparing memoir, the author documents unimaginable brutality against women with dignity and grace and provides readers with an urgent education about the devastating scope of human trafficking in the modern world.
Difficult but necessary reading.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64160-237-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
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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