March 2017 Book Review

This month I will be reviewing Trevor Noah's Born a Crime.  That I came to know about this book is a pure fluke.  It's another situation where I had recorded a talk show and watched an interview of someone I had never heard of before and they talked about their book.  Normally I would fast forward through the interviews of the individuals I didn't know (or had no interest in) but for some reason I didn't do that in this instance.

I'll be honest, what drew me in was the fact that he's from Africa.  For the last couple of years I've been fascinated by all things Africa and have been reading books, watching movies and documentaries and doing whatever else I could to get information about Africa.  So, when I heard he was from Africa and that because of the laws and traditions in South Africa, his birth was a crime, I immediately put the eBook on hold at my local library.

I waited months for it to become available and almost didn't check it out when I was told it was available because I was back to feeling that I had no idea who this person was and wasn't sure I wanted to invest my time into reading his story.  My fascination with Africa won out though and I'm glad it did.

This is a story about a young man who had the odds stacked against him.  His mother wanted a child but didn't - at the time - want to be burdened with a husband so she made an arrangement with a friend for him to father a child with her.  The problem was, he was white and she was black and the act of sex between the races was illegal.  As a result, special care was taken when they were in public to hide the truth of who his parents were because otherwise his parents were subject to criminal charges.

The book is written in an interesting way in that he starts each chapter off giving information about what was going on in South Africa at a particular time and then follows it up with an applicable story from his life.  In reading this book I discovered that Trevor Noah is an incredibly intelligent and funny person who grew up with an amazing mother.  His mother is someone who refused to be held back by her gender or her race and she taught Trevor to push his boundaries and not limit himself to what others might put on him.  And the love between the two is evident in this book.  I very much enjoyed reading it and would highly recommend it.

For more book reviews, go to barriesummy.blogspot.com.