Thoughtful, evocative and deeply felt, but occasionally lacking freshness.
A writer born in England in 1968 of Ghanaian parents visits Africa hoping to find the source of his malaise and rage—and a place he might call home.
Eshun (director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts) begins this debut work aboard an airplane to Ghana. Although he had lived there in his early childhood, he grew up in England, where he often felt rootless. He writes bitterly about the racism—overt and covert—that he experienced in England. And he recalls with regret a failed relationship with a woman—a relationship that ended, he feels, because he was unwilling to reveal his history. It is a history that has tormented him both in his waking hours and in his dreams. (One great source of unhappiness: His father had served time as a political prisoner in Ghana.) As the author tours Africa, he pauses to tell the history of the region—with sharpest focus on the slave trade. (About halfway through, he hears from a Ghanaian relative some grim, disorienting news about an ancestor.) Touring Ghana, Eshun also discusses his own biography (and those of his parents) and comments on issues that trouble and even haunt him. He is disturbed by some aspects of the country. He sees young people adopting America’s hip-hop culture. He sees other youngsters wearing Osama bin Laden T-shirts. He visits a fundamentalist Christian church where a crass minister demands cash from his congregation. He experiences what he calls the “Big Man” psychology of Ghanaian men—a social posture of superiority many adopt with those they believe are below them in the human hierarchy. He sees poverty and hopelessness. Much of the writing is lyrical and deeply personal, though some of the author’s epiphanies seem more patent than revelational (e.g., “[I]t came to me that journeys never truly end”).
Thoughtful, evocative and deeply felt, but occasionally lacking freshness.Pub Date: June 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-42418-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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 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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