" substantial collection of staggering personal essays. . . . The book is essential reading not only because it is a personal story of survival, leavened with insight and wit, but because it does more to expose apartheid-its legacy, its pettiness, its small-minded stupidity and its damage-than any other recent history book or academic text." - The Guardian (UK) " Born a Crime is an engaging, fast-paced and vivid read. Noah proves to be a gifted storyteller, able to deftly lace his poignant tales with amusing irony." - Entertainment Weekly Noah's family, at life in South Africa under apartheid and the country's lurching entry into a postapartheid era in the 1990s." - The New York Times By turns alarming, sad and funny, book provides a harrowing look, through the prism of Mr. Winner of the 2017 Thurber Prize for American Humour His stories weave together to form a moving and searingly funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humor and a mother's unconventional, unconditional love. Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Trevor illuminates his curious world with an incisive wit and unflinching honesty. The eighteen personal essays collected here are by turns hilarious, dramatic, and deeply affecting. 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 compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime New York Times bestseller about one man's coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed.
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