Synopsis
In 1964, when Peter Godwin was five, he experienced the end of white rule in Africa through the death of his neighbor, murdered by guerillas. This is the story of his growing-up years in chaotic Zimbabwe. The son of a country doctor and an engineer, he became a soldier fighting in a civil war, then a journalist who returned home to cover the bloody transition of power.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2005-01-30 |
| Size | | Length: | 418 pages | | Height: | 8.5 in | | Width: | 5.8 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 16.8 oz |
Industry Reviews
"Peter Godwin has written an eminently readable if harrowing account of his childhood and youth in late Rhodesia and early Zimbabwe. Without overburdening the reader with soul-baring, the book shows the difficulties of being an anti-Smith white during those troubled years....For this reviewer, who also grew up in Rhodesia and lived in newly independent Zimbabwe, Peter Godwin's book poignantly evokes the extremes of that beautiful country."
Spectator - Richard Acton (03/16/1996)
"Godwin's childhood journey takes him past many adult milestones, but the real joy of the book comes in the child's order he imposes on them, with observations that are often as gruesome as they are logical."
Literary Review - Fiammetta Rocco (03/19/1996)
"...it has a kind of redemptive force in the narrative, which is essentially confessional in spirit. Altogether, swerving between arresting images and phrases and an attractive, muscular artlessness, the most important quality of 'Mukiwa' is its hard-won truthfulness."
Times Literary Supplement - Giles Foden (04/26/1996)
"From time to time a book comes out of Africa that is so good it grips American readers by their hearts. This should be one of them....In its early chapters it reminded me of...'To Kill a Mockingbird', which paid tribute to the harmonies of the Old South even while condemning its vicious racial injustice....'Mukiwa' is not only a memoir of great sensitivity and skill; it's a compelling adventure story as well."
Washington Post Book World - Jeff Stein (07/07/1996)
"Forget about the breast-beating confessions by people who have grown up under apartheid or neighboring forms of racist colonialism. Peter Godwin's book is, at last, a totally unsentimental, honest testimony....It is part of the truth about the era of colonialism and its consequences that must be pieced together, now, in the history of this, the century for which we are all, in one way or another, responsible."
Advertisement - Nadine Gordimer
"'Mukiwa'...is an antiheroic memoir. It is filled with what one is in the habit of calling adventure: narrow escapes, a harrowing return in disguise...., a last-minute flight from certain arrest and imprisonment. But these episodes can be called adventures only if they're stripped of their private meaning, and that, fortunately, Godwin is unable to do; the book lacks the roistering jingoism...that is necessary to such stories. Instead, it chronicles the development of a kind of internal exile....The tone throughout the book--muted, graciously sad--is the consequence of a liberal mind discovering its own inutility....What's special is the sense one gets...of a conscience that tries to resist coarsening and does not forgive its own failures."
New Yorker - Verlyn Klinkenborg (09/23/1996)
"...a beautiful, painful, and subtle memoir of growing up in Ian Smith's redoubt."
Pointon
| Find errors in the product description? Submit a catalog update request now. |
All rights reserved.
