“The tone of the book makes me feel I am talking with a next-door neighbor—casual and low key. This, despite descriptions of obviously different customs, such as a funeral, meals, and family relations. He boasts about his father’s strength and tells of his life growing up, working in his father’s fields and playing with friends. When famine hits, Kamkwambe doesn’t treat it in a dramatic way but simply relates his observations and experiences: how his hunger makes him feel, how his mother works to get the next day’s food, the sight of people looking to work for food and, later, dying of starvation. All this is additional to the main theme of the book: Kamkwambe’s intense interest in electricity and how, lacking the money for schooling and with poor English skills, he finds a book in the small local library and teaches himself how to wire his family’s house for electricity and build a windmill out of an odd assortment of broken bikes, machines, and cast off trash. This theme is very inspiring and is every home-schooling parent’s dream of what their child could do if unfettered by a restrictive teach-to-the-test educational system. The book ends with Kamkwambe’s belief that , with dedicated work by its citizens, Africa can move into the modern age.
This was not rated as a 5 because of a tendency, mid-book, to stray into didactic explanations of how electricity works—of interest, perhaps, only to another fanatic or third world inventor. There was also a duplicate recounting of how tobacco is grown.
-Reviewed by Juniper as part of the BayShore Bookworms
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