A somewhat tone-deaf depiction of a white child’s picturesque childhood in mid-20th-century Northern Rhodesia.
In this semiautobiographical novel, Stevens (Hero of the Struggle, 2011) recounts his adventurous childhood in South Africa and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).
Beginning with his earliest memories as a twin in the womb, Stevens uses tongue-in-cheek humor to describe the relatively carefree childhood he enjoyed as the son of middle-class white parents in 1940s and 1950s South Africa. As the only son, Stevens enjoyed a precariously balanced peace with his twin sister, “Twiny,” and older sister, “Big Sis.” Stevens describes himself as the “model boy” living in a “model village.” He is the favorite of his mother and a bit of a ham. Stevens colorfully describes the many antics he played as a rascal child, including a trial drive of his father’s car, with wry humor and descriptive stage-setting. The family balance tipped with the birth of the author’s third sister, “Little Sis.” Stevens’ father, a miner, transferred the family to Northern Rhodesia after a work opportunity arose. In lush detail, Stevens describes the new terrain and wildlife. The nostalgic, vividly described memories of adventures in the Rhodesian bush with friends transport the reader to a time before video games and the Internet (“No computer game can simulate what we learned in the bush”). As Stevens grew to be a teenager, his rebellious spirit continued. He adopted a James Dean-like ducktail haircut and mixed with other like-minded teenagers. Meanwhile, a changing political climate and conflict brewed in Africa. The prose is at times politically incorrect; black Africans are simply called “the blacks,” and the historic struggles are but lightly acknowledged: “It may be true that a change from white minority rule was necessary, that it was the moral course to follow, but it’s also true that it really messed up my idyllic childhood.” Readers should beware of some politically incorrect, off-color humor.
A somewhat tone-deaf depiction of a white child’s picturesque childhood in mid-20th-century Northern Rhodesia.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463726829
Page Count: 228
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
