Latest news with #Tanzanian-British
The Age
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
TV travel shows are overpacked with celebs – but this actor can't be beaten
WATCH / That's amore! If there's a better sight than Stanley Tucci shovelling pasta in his mouth and looking absolutely delighted, I'm yet to find it (with apologies to husband and child). The Oscar-nominated actor is back with yet another foodie travel series in Italy. This one, Tucci in Italy, is produced by National Geographic after CNN cancelled his original show, Searching for Italy (which you can still watch on SBS On Demand) – and Tucci once again pops on the chinos, loosens his belt and hits the road, eating his way around Italy's regions and exclaiming ' Mangia! Mangia!' And yes, while I understand all the eye-rolling about the dozens of inane celebrity travel shows scattered about, Tucci can't be beaten for his enthusiasm, generosity and sheer love of the country of his forebears. It also helps that he can cook and isn't afraid to eat (pizza, pasta, offal, mouldy cheese – he'll try it all). So leave the cynicism behind and embrace Tucci, his travels and his chinos. From May 19 on Disney+. Louise Rugendyke Theft ($33), by Tanzanian-British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, is his first novel since he won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. Set in Tanzania in the 1990s, it explores the interconnected lives of three young people: Karim, Badar and Fauzia. Karim, abandoned by his mother, Raya, when she remarries, later lives with her and her second husband, Haji, while at university. There, he befriends their servant, Badar, an orphan boy. When Badar is falsely accused of theft, Karim, now married to Fauzia, takes him into their home and helps him to find a job in a boutique hotel. Tensions arise when Karim and Fauzia struggle to cope with the arrival of their first child. A morality tale featuring themes of abandonment, indebtedness, jealousy and betrayal with a deeply satisfying ending. Nicole Abadee LISTEN / Plot twist In 2020, a ragtag collection of anti-government, self-styled militia dudes plotted to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. What they didn't know was that there were government informants embedded in the group who were setting up a sting operation. In the podcast Chameleon: The Michigan Plot, investigative reporters Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison expertly tell the bizarre but true tale, aided by tragicomic FBI audio retrieved from bugging devices. What we hear is like a cross between The Big Lebowski and a Quentin Tarantino film, which would be funny if the plot didn't involve a plot to harm a human being. But were they really criminal masterminds or just paranoid, hyped-up stoners who believed misinformation and ultimately fell victim to FBI entrapment? Barry Divola
Sydney Morning Herald
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
TV travel shows are overpacked with celebs – but this actor can't be beaten
WATCH / That's amore! If there's a better sight than Stanley Tucci shovelling pasta in his mouth and looking absolutely delighted, I'm yet to find it (with apologies to husband and child). The Oscar-nominated actor is back with yet another foodie travel series in Italy. This one, Tucci in Italy, is produced by National Geographic after CNN cancelled his original show, Searching for Italy (which you can still watch on SBS On Demand) – and Tucci once again pops on the chinos, loosens his belt and hits the road, eating his way around Italy's regions and exclaiming ' Mangia! Mangia!' And yes, while I understand all the eye-rolling about the dozens of inane celebrity travel shows scattered about, Tucci can't be beaten for his enthusiasm, generosity and sheer love of the country of his forebears. It also helps that he can cook and isn't afraid to eat (pizza, pasta, offal, mouldy cheese – he'll try it all). So leave the cynicism behind and embrace Tucci, his travels and his chinos. From May 19 on Disney+. Louise Rugendyke Theft ($33), by Tanzanian-British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, is his first novel since he won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. Set in Tanzania in the 1990s, it explores the interconnected lives of three young people: Karim, Badar and Fauzia. Karim, abandoned by his mother, Raya, when she remarries, later lives with her and her second husband, Haji, while at university. There, he befriends their servant, Badar, an orphan boy. When Badar is falsely accused of theft, Karim, now married to Fauzia, takes him into their home and helps him to find a job in a boutique hotel. Tensions arise when Karim and Fauzia struggle to cope with the arrival of their first child. A morality tale featuring themes of abandonment, indebtedness, jealousy and betrayal with a deeply satisfying ending. Nicole Abadee LISTEN / Plot twist In 2020, a ragtag collection of anti-government, self-styled militia dudes plotted to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. What they didn't know was that there were government informants embedded in the group who were setting up a sting operation. In the podcast Chameleon: The Michigan Plot, investigative reporters Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison expertly tell the bizarre but true tale, aided by tragicomic FBI audio retrieved from bugging devices. What we hear is like a cross between The Big Lebowski and a Quentin Tarantino film, which would be funny if the plot didn't involve a plot to harm a human being. But were they really criminal masterminds or just paranoid, hyped-up stoners who believed misinformation and ultimately fell victim to FBI entrapment? Barry Divola
Wall Street Journal
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Fiction: Abdulrazak Gurnah's ‘Theft'
In Abdulrazak Gurnah's 'Theft' (Riverhead, 304 pages, $30), a Tanzanian servant named Badar is listening to an anecdote being told by an older friend, the house's gardener. Impatient with the gardener's digressions, Badar tries to jump ahead to the point of the story, only to be smilingly admonished. 'Don't be in such a hurry,' the gardener says. 'Many things happened. That's how it is in life, many things happen.' That's also how it tends to be in Mr. Gurnah's novels, of which 'Theft' is the 11th—and the first since the Tanzanian-British author was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2021. Taking place from the 1990s into the 2010s, the book traces the intersecting lives of two men and a woman. The focus of the initial chapters is Karim, who overcomes a neglectful childhood by excelling in his studies, emerging as an up-and-coming government official in charge of environmental programs in the island city of Zanzibar. A marker of Karim's success is his marriage to Fauzia, an aspiring teacher whose path we follow from her own high-achieving student days. The cloud over Fauzia's happiness is her epilepsy, which she fears she will pass on to her children. Separate from the couple, yet soon entwined in their lives, is Badar, who is sent at age 13 from his farming village to Dar es Salaam, a city on the mainland, to work as a servant for Karim's mother and stepfather. Though Badar grasps that there is 'something degraded about his circumstances,' his honesty and self-possession make him an esteemed member of the household. When events conspire to take him to live with Karim and Fauzia in Zanzibar, he finds work at a tourist hotel, and his status—dependent or a friend?—grows blurrier. 'To himself he said ruefully, Once a servant, always a servant, but it did not feel like that,' writes Mr. Gurnah, a characteristically simple phrase suggesting vast emotions. In his sensitive and cheerfully unrushed fashion, Mr. Gurnah advances the trajectories of the trio to explore the mutable nature of family. There is an upstairs-downstairs story in 'Theft,' which fruitfully explores the meanings of work and love from Karim's and Badar's different points of view. The novel is also attuned to the influence of Tanzania's political evolution on the characters' private lives (Westerners from relief organizations gradually intrude on more and more of the narrative).
