Born A Crime, Trevor Noah

Rating: 5/5

This is the sort of book you read that just puts a smile on your face. You just came home from a long, tiring day, you decide to relax and curl up with a book. You end up reading a chapter and before you know it you are smiling and laughing to yourself daydreaming about the adventures of a young Trevor Noah growing up in South Africa. Laughing about the power of Trevor’s prayers or that time when he went to jail and didn’t know if to pretend to be a colored gangster or not.

This book is your after a hard day book, after a fun day book, a take on a relaxing vacation book, it is a ‘let me read a quick chapter on the bus’ book. It is engrossing, it is fun, it is entertaining.

This is the same Trevor Noah that we see on the Daily Show, the captivating host who is able to educate his audience on a serious topic (in this case various aspects of apartheid in South Africa), without coming across as a heavy history lesson.

To be honest, a lot of what I know about apartheid I learned from reading books about Nelson Mandela or watching documentaries. When you think about apartheid, you think of black or white, but what about the children who have one black parent and one white parent, a colored child. Trevor’s book gives us a glimpse of what this was like for him and other colored kids growing up in those times.

This book is a wonderful memoir and a true tribute to his wonderful, feisty, determined, driven mother, Patricia.

PS. This book is available on Amazon US $19.26 Hardcover and it is surely worth the read.

Much Love

CS