An awkwardly written but genuinely inspiring memoir of a disabled Rwandan educator.
A powerful Rwandan memoir of survival and transcendence, reduced to an oddly dry little book.
In this debut memoir, Ndabaramiye, with the assistance of children’s book author Parker (My Christmas List, 2013, etc.), describes his personal experience in the Rwandan genocide and how he has rebuilt his life in the service of others like himself. In the immediate aftermath of the genocide, he was one of a busload of travelers captured by a terrorist militia. They commanded the teenage Ndabaramiye to kill his fellow prisoners with a machete. When he refused on grounds of his religion, he was forced to watch the rest of the group murdered by the militia, who then hacked off his hands and left him to be stoned to death by children. He escaped, found help and was treated by an experienced surgeon at an overwhelmed hospital. Without hands or a family able to support him, he despaired; however, through a fresh embrace of his religion, he found the will to recover. He was accepted by an American-run orphanage, and there, he learned to care for himself and to write, draw and teach. In time, he made connections that helped him co-found a community center and primary school to help other disabled people make the most of their abilities. Ndabaramiye has a solid evangelical Christian worldview, but this should not put off non-Christian readers; his resilience and dedication to the service of others is inspiring. Stories like these need no elaborate presentation, but the author’s calm, straightforward style sometimes slides into a bare-bones narrative that can obscure and distance the events, places and characters he describes. In addition, the book is marred by odd language constructions that do not serve the author’s purpose—e.g., a reference to how he and his partners “concepted a Learning Center.”
An awkwardly written but genuinely inspiring memoir of a disabled Rwandan educator.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-529-10119-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
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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