A readable, insightful memoir by a major talent, particularly enjoyable for those already familiar with Mda’s body of work...
Acclaimed South African novelist, playwright and poet Mda (Cion, 2007, etc.) pens a memoir setting his experiences against the backdrop of a country in turmoil.
Both the author’s life and his narrative style are characterized by a sensorial roving through experience. Although he spent his early years in Soweto, Mda was forced to escape to Lesotho after his father was exiled because of his activism against apartheid. This change brought many adjustments for the young Mda involving his spoken language, local customs and the level of political awareness of his family and peers. Although his family was connected to power players in the anti-apartheid movement, including Nelson Mandela, Mda’s own peripatetic journeys of romance, rebellion and his search for an artistic calling often kept him feeling like an outsider, a theme repeated throughout the memoir. Mda’s eventful life is full of colorful characters, including childhood sweethearts, pedophile priests, shaman uncles and carousing artists. The structure of the narrative is challenging, as the author moves fluidly between the past and a point of relative present, and provides extensive commentary on both the details and the major events of his life. At nearly 600 pages, the book does contain some overwrought passages but is generally engaging.
A readable, insightful memoir by a major talent, particularly enjoyable for those already familiar with Mda’s body of work or with the cultural moments that helped to shape him.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-28094-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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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