A very unsatisfactory follow-up.
Hofmann returns to Kenya 14 years after marrying a Masai warrior and giving birth to his child.
Oddly, this second sequel to four-million-copy bestseller The White Masai (2006) is being released before its immediate predecessor, Back From Africa, which deals with the author’s post-Kenyan life back home in Switzerland. So Hofmann’s considerable readership is immediately transported back to familiar territory, as she begins this installment by expressing a few self-doubts about the return venture and then heading back to search for her former husband, Lketinga. But the success of Hofmann’s memoir has made this trip altogether different, and she spends a generous portion of the book discussing the movie adaptation of The White Masai, which is being shot at the same time as her reunion with Lketinga and his family. Also, she has divorced Lketinga, although this means nothing in Africa, where she is still regarded as one of his wives. Hofmann sticks to the short, staccato prose that made the original book so successful, and she delights in being reunited with her former husband, his mother and many others. But once those events are documented, the narrative doesn’t really go anywhere. It lacks both the specificity and the sense of wide-eyed wonder that Hofmann’s first memoir delivered so effectively, and it often feels like she’s struggling to stir new ingredients into the pot. Most disappointingly, the author doesn’t bring along her now-teenage daughter, Napirai, which would surely have led to some intriguing moments with Lketinga. In fact, it often seems as though both Hofmann and her former husband have simply moved on; the connection they once enjoyed has vanished from both their lives and, in turn, from Hofmann’s prose. Fleeting interest is created by Lketinga’s thoughts on mercenary journalists who have tracked him down in the wake of the first book’s success, but there are too many dull details, especially concerning the unremarkable movie shoot.
A very unsatisfactory follow-up.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-905147-13-7
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Bliss/Arcadia Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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