In this warm tribute, la Grange testifies to Mandela’s charm and charisma and the profound changes he effected in her own...
A loving portrait of Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) by a devoted assistant.
For 18 years, la Grange worked for Nelson Mandela, rising from typist to private secretary and finally to manager and spokesperson for his office. In this debut memoir, she recounts her stressful, demanding career as one of Mandela’s closest aides. It was an unlikely position for a white South African who was raised to hate and fear black people. “No person is born a racist,” she writes. “You become a racist by influences around you. And I had become a racist by the time I was thirteen years old.” Mandela, though, transformed her: He was a man, she attests, of unimpeachable integrity, humanity and kindness. Seeking no honors for himself, he worked tirelessly on issues of health, freedom and peace. In his 70s when she joined his staff, he treated her like a cherished granddaughter; she called him Khulu, or grandfather. The author chronicles Mandela’s whirlwind travels to raise funds for his three foundations and to fulfill countless invitations. He had become, the author writes, “the savior of everything and everybody.” In the course of those travels, la Grange met world leaders (the Clintons get special praise), movie stars (she was thrilled to meet Hugh Grant) and celebrity activists (Bono, for one, was much respected by Mandela). Part of her job was to protect Mandela from an onslaught of people requesting his help and from the relentless media. Although she writes that this is “not a tell-all book,” nor “a book of great political insights,” the author does expose vicious conflicts within Mandela’s family. Some relatives resented her and ordered her to stay out of Mandela’s personal life, but she could not help but run to his side when he called for his “Zeldina.”
In this warm tribute, la Grange testifies to Mandela’s charm and charisma and the profound changes he effected in her own life.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0525428282
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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