Untitled Document

Review of:
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, by Alexandra Fuller
The memoir of a "white African girl" who was born in England but grew up in Africa, first in Rhodesia, where her family moved during the civil war(!), then in Zambia, Malawi, and back to Zambia. She describes her parents' racism; the hard-scrabble life on farms that have seen better days; the pestilence and hazards of living each day with guns and snakes, rebel forces and backbiting servants. She normalizes, as only a child can do, the dysfunction of a parent's alcoholism after the death of her children, the very real danger of poisonous snakes, and the children's use of rifles at a very early age. The book is quirky, engaging, childlike about very grown-up matters. It is illuminating about a part of the world and a part of that world's history that many of us know little about, and it sheds light on it from the inside, from someone for whom it was home.
Lawrie Merz , reviewer

The memoir of a "white African girl" who was born in England but grew up in Africa, first in Rhodesia, where her family moved during the civil war(!), then in Zambia, Malawi, and back to Zambia. She describes her parents' racism; the hard-scrabble life on farms that have seen better days; the pestilence and hazards of living each day with guns and snakes, rebel forces and backbiting servants. She normalizes, as only a child can do, the dysfunction of a parent's alcoholism after the death of her children, the very real danger of poisonous snakes, and the children's use of rifles at a very early age. The book is quirky, engaging, childlike about very grown-up matters. It is illuminating about a part of the world and a part of that world's history that many of us know little about, and it sheds light on it from the inside, from someone for whom it was home.