Review: Born a Crime

 Stories from a South-African childhood

by Trevor Noah

Very, very good memoir. He writes about his years of growing up in post-apartheid South Africa, with a history lesson or two thrown in.  It’s both funny and sad; at times sad and funny, at times sadly funny and sometimes just plain funny. His mother was a force of nature with a brain. She refused to be caught in the system of what black people could and could not do and somehow got away with some of the stunts she pulled—going to whites-only places, having an out-of-wedlock child with a white man, which was illegal, living in a white neighborhood.

But then she hooked up with a man who seemed okay for many years but ended up being an abuser and a hopeless businessman.  She refused to be subservient in many of the ways his family expected, and then she found out that he expected the subservience too. And eventually, the hitting began. But then she ended up sticking with him for way longer than she should have…and I can’t give away any more here.

Trevor Noah seemed to be an excessively smart kid who somehow managed to game the system and break out of poverty. Great reading.