![]() ![]() It covers quite serious issues but Noah talks about his life with such charm and humour, that it never feels depressing, and the balance of more serious stories and more light hearted ones is done well. I have to admit, hearing him talk about all the different languages he speaks made me quite jealous, as try as I might, I’m still only fluent in English (my aim is to one day be at least conversationally fluent in Spanish as well, but that seems a long way off!).Īs you’d expect given that Noah is a comedian, this book is incredibly funny. The narration was definitely the star of this book, I always recommend listening to memoirs rather than reading them in physical format because they are so often narrated by their authors and how better to consume a story about someone’s life than listening to the person concerned tell it? But for this memoir, that applies even more because Trevor Noah is just such a fantastic storyteller, lively and engaging, and so skilled at different languages and dialects that it’s worth getting the audio just to hear him slip easily in and out of multiple languages, as well as hear his incredibly on-point imitations of his family and friends (all in perfect accents, of course). It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother-his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.īorn a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. ![]() The memoir of one man’s coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed. I’m glad I listened to all the raves, because this book was fantastic, definitely one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read. But I kept seeing his memoir pop up in people’s Top Ten Tuesday lists for months and months, and everyone was raving about how good it was, and since spending almost three months in Cape Town at the beginning of 2020, I was quite interested in reading a memoir of someone who is from there and grew up in such a turbulent time in South Africa’s history. ![]() I have to admit, before reading this, I was only vaguely aware of Trevor Noah, in that I knew his name and knew that he hosted The Daily Show in the US, but I’d never heard any of his comedy. BECHDEL TEST: N/A (since this is a memoir)Ĭontent Warnings: Racism, discussions of Apartheid, shooting, domestic abuse, racial slurs, violence, animal cruelty, classism, poverty, alcoholism, physical abuse, child abuse, misogyny, police brutality, mentions of slavery and colonialism, anti-semitism, animal death, pregnancy, medical and hospital content, bullying, blood, sexual assault
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