27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A tragic, yet fascinating personal account, May 30, 2006
This review is from: Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa (Hardcover)
When Lauren is killed, Wendy's past comes to stalk her like a jungle animal. She and Lauren and their sister Sharon grew up in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), and she realizes that she will have to go back to Africa in order to move forward with her life in America.
The three sisters were raised dysfunctionally, amidst a landscape of madness, terror and war. Their parents were at odds --- their mother a rapidly deteriorating alcoholic, their father increasingly melancholy as events in their adopted home shifted like quicksand. Wendy, the oldest sibling, became a surrogate mother to Sharon and baby Lauren, a role that was forced on her by such incidents as the night Lauren disappeared. "The doorbell rang. I rushed to answer it and found a stranger there holding Lauren, who was blinking her round brown eyes in the soft outside light...My father was still at work. My mother had been in her bedroom all day. 'She belongs here,' I said finally, reaching out to take my little sister."
A divorce eventually occurred and the girls' father remarried. His new wife was capricious and cold and made Wendy's life worse. Her father's eventual accidental death was whispered among the family to be a suicide, and the girls' mother passed away in an institution. Meanwhile in Rhodesia, rumors of war, acts of terror and rumblings of inevitable change became commonplace.
"If you had asked anyone in the bars or clubs who we were fighting, only the most dull-eyed would have snarled, 'Kaffirs.' Some, more sober, might have said 'communism.' No one in my generation recognized that we were fighting to preserve an unsustainable way of life." After the war, there were still servants but they had to be paid more and there were many more locks on many more doors. As the old culture of colonialism died out to be replaced by a new kind of imperialism of the recently oppressed, Wendy made a passive escape by following her boyfriend to Europe and finally to Connecticut where she settled in to a comfortingly safe life raising her children and working as a counselor. Until she got the phone call about Lauren.
Going back for the funeral, Wendy is caught up in the drama of Africa once again. She senses generations of pain that she had not before confronted, in her meeting with Moses, a servant hired by Lauren's husband to keep poachers away. Intrigued, Wendy asks to photograph Moses with his powerful rifle. Moses assents, but "there was nothing coming from his eyes...I stared hard at Moses and recognized powerlessness." Despite the rifle, Moses still fears the white lady and her potential to humiliate and harm.
Lauren had been living in Zambia when her vehicle ran off a lonely road. Her son Luke, who was in the car with her, was just a baby. A major priority for the surviving sisters is arranging schooling and childcare for the boy. Revisiting Luke with Sharon when he is seven, Wendy comes to understand that Luke needs not just childcare now that his mother is gone; he needs a memory of Lauren. Wendy is able to tell him that the accident was "the car's fault" and that his mother loved him.
CASTING WITH A FRAGILE THREAD is written episodically, poetically, by someone who didn't plan to write a book. It is Wendy's gift to Luke, her eulogy to her spirited sister Lauren, and her way of comforting herself for her enduring loss.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Awe-inspiring, February 17, 2007
This review is from: Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa (Hardcover)
Wendy Kann's personal and political history in "Casting with a fragile thread" is riveting, wise and timeless. It is a gripping memoir about a woman who has risen above her traumatic childhood and turned her pain into compassion and healing.
Born in colonial Rhodesia--now Zimbabwe--Kann grew up during the country's 13-year civil war. She experienced the first elections in Zimbabwe in 1980 and lived in Hong Kong when the British officials handed the city over to the Chinese in 1997. She said both experiences were nagging reminders that the laws, police, media, army and government can bring bewildering uncertainty to a safe, predictable orderly world.
She writes poetically about her environment--how the lawns in America's neighborhoods simply roll trustingly one into the next, without the rude division of fences and gates.
Having spent my early years in South Africa I too had my "mind revolt against the terrifying avalanche of choice" and tried to figure what "American" was and how I could be "just that."
Kann's observation years later about Rhodesia's civil war is a warning to all countries. She said, "No one in my generation recognized that we were fighting a war to preserve an unsustainable way of life."
Her quote reminded me of America. We have the technology for alternative fuel yet we remain in a war in the Middle East because of an addiction to oil, a non-renewable resource.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Read, May 16, 2006
This review is from: Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa (Hardcover)
I didn't really know what to expect when I first picked this book up on the recommendation from a friend but soon found I was unable to put it down. It is humbling to see how people can be brought up under such adversity and come through it. I loved the author's style which was easy to read despite some harrowing scenes. The book is based on the author's own experiences and captures the political events that surrounded the period. It does not come across as self serving but instead as a journal of events across the globe. Despite this being based on true occurences, her style would readily translate to further books. Well worth the read!
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