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Title: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller ISBN: 0375507507 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 18 December, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.32
Rating: 5
Summary: Finally! We have a different perspective
Comment: Any time you hear about southern Africa's history in the U.S., you usually only hear about the repression of the native Africans and the evil colonials that supressed them. As the American-born daughter of a white Rhodesian, I am ecstactic to finally have found a novel that reveals how life was for the Europeans in Southern Africa during the years of turmoil.
Alexandra Fuller's attention to detail (especially to the region's dialect and the sights and smells) and sense of humor create an intensly engaging story of one white family's survival in a chaotic and intense evironment. Fuller creates a very authentic, no-apology narrative that America should appreciate as an honest glimpse of life in Africa.
Her frankness about her family's feelings toward the native Africans only gives her story credibility. While most Americans will consider this racism, they need to look beyond that stereotype and see that the family was simply reacting to the environment and times they were in. Overall, this novel is about the challenges the family faced and how they managed to overcome them and stay together as a family. Truly a portrait of courage.
If you are looking for "the other side of the story" when it comes to Southern Africa, you could not have found a better book. The sincerity and honesty of Fuller's novel are valuable assets in a world filled with stereotypes and ignorance.
Rating: 5
Summary: A harrowing, enchanting read by a major new writer
Comment: "My God, I am the WRONG color." This is one of the brilliant flashes of wry insight delivered up by Alexandra Fuller in this harrowing, enchanting, beautifully rendered account of a childhood lived in the waning days of British colonial Africa. Ms. Fuller has a keen, ever alert eye for myriad vivid details of existence in this exotic tale of one family's survival in some of the most remote and inhospitable places on earth, set against the backdrop of a civil war spinning out of control. Her family manages (somehow) to eke out a living (often hand to mouth) in the melting, oven-breath heat of withering African scrub-land. The picaresque landscape turns out to be every bit as hostile and deadly as the threat from rebels.
Honest and unflinching, the author's spellbinding account leaps off the page and graps the reader, pulling one irresistably into a succession of spine-thrilling, rib-tickling scenes: Eye-Burning Hot. Mine Fields. Leopard Poachers. White Racism. Gun-Totting Children. The reader sees what Ms. Fuller sees--sees it all, hears it all, with all the symphonic virtuosity of a passionate, peerless raconteuse.
[Sound Track] [Fade-in] Soft cadence of Cape turtledoves, "Work-HARD-er, work-HARD-er." The booming bells of Big Ben crackle listlessly from a makeshift radio mounted, ignominiously, in the branches of an acacia tree and attached to a long tail of wire that requires hours of spinning its aerial web around the arbors of nearby trees. Over here, against a nearby khaki bush, an African girl (nicknamed "Burning Piggy" by darker-skinned classmates) stands out like a large marshmallow (her words), ready to return today to boarding school in neighboring Zambia. At the frontier, in a moment charged with high drama and even higher comedy, she tries not to get herself shot by an extortionist posing as a customs officer who wields an AK-47 like a tennis racket. Later, crossing the narrow bridge spanning the Zambezi River that heralds her entry into Zambia, she scans the water excitedly for hippos, announcing, "If I weren't going back to school today, I would be in heaven." [Fade-out]
Whether Ms. Fuller is recounting a bollixed border crossing, an awkward meal with half-starving peasants, a wedding braai feeding hundreds, or rebels storming her family's farmhouse--my God, what a mad mad world! "Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight" is a rare read, a stunning tour-de-force by an exceptionally gifted writer.
Pace Ralph Waldo Emerson: I greet Alexandra Fuller at the start of a great career.
Rating: 5
Summary: Great story
Comment: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. "Bobo", as she is called as a youngster, has a keen memory of life in Africa growing up as a white African in rural Africa. She tells stories of her family (including an endlessly teasing sister and half-crazy mother) and all their assorted pets, as they travelled together as a group from farm to farm. I could totally relate to her descriptions of the sights, smells and sounds of the areas in which she lived! Having lived myself in Africa as a child and visited as an adult, I say that Alexandra Fuller is spot in with details, racially, geographically and from all (six) senses. I hated for this to end, this journey into the tales of her childhood.
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Title: Mukiwa : White Boy in Africa, A by Peter Godwin ISBN: 006097723X Publisher: HarperCollins (paper) Pub. Date: May, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Emma's War: An Aid Worker, a Warlord, Radical Islam, and the Politics of Oil--A True Story of Love and Death in Sudan by Deborah Scroggins ISBN: 0375403973 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith ISBN: 1400031346 Publisher: Anchor Books Pub. Date: September, 2002 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt ISBN: 0375401318 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 05 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan ISBN: 0385503954 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 12 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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