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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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