Zimbabwe Books

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

Alexandra Fuller

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 181 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Incredibly sad 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Although mostly well-written, this memoir is very depressing. I was expecting more about Africa from this NF book, but it's largely the tale of a highly dysfunctional family that suffers blow after blow, bringing much of it on itself. And no one seems to learn anything from their mistakes. The Book of Job is uplifting reading by comparison.

Interesting read! 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I certainly enjoyed this book. We will be reading this book as a choice for a book club. There is a lot to discuss-from the family life to the unrest that is pertinent to what was once Rhodesia and is now suddenly thrust into the spotlight as Zimbabwe. Ms. Fuller takes you to a place that few in today's world will experience. She is honest in her depiction of her family and one is caught up in each of their personalities. I wish more books could offer such insight and descriptions that will both educate and entertain at the same time.

Gail Boyd, Washington, Ga.

Editorial Review:

In Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller’s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa

Peter Godwin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 55 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Thought Provoking Memoir 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

When A Crocodile Eats The Sun is a gripping memoir detailing the account of author Peter Godwin and his experiences in Zimbabwe. Set in the time of the brutal regime of Robert Mugabe, his story is one of perseverance and reflection. When his parents refuse to leave Zimbabwe even amongst the brutality and corruption, Peter must learn to understand his parent's decision, even if it may cost them their lives.
Peter Godwin writes this memoir from a very honest perspective. Without incorporating a major bias into his writing, he has managed to craft a factual representation of what happened in Zimbabwe under President Mugabe. He brings to light a very relevant and important issue in our world today, and raises awareness about the horrors of governmental corruption and oppression. He effectively works to show how President Mugabe was a two faced president who often said one thing and did another. "And you could see that this was a man fueled by thoughts of revenge, that he was boiling with public humiliation. How could he, who had liberated his people, now be rejected?...It couldn't be his own people who had done this...it must have been other people, white people, leading them astray" (59.) Peter Godwin not only explains the situation in Zimbabwe, he takes us through the events and thought processes of the leaders to illustrate how it happened. It is a riveting account in which he masterfully weaves the story of the rise of hate against whites and the struggles of his own family, including the failing health of his father. The author struggles with staying true to his homeland and saving his fathers life. "'Dad's life's on the line here,' I say. `The time for political correctness is over. We must get him the best physician'" (18.) He shows here how he finds it difficult to understand his parent's stubborn enchantment with the ways of a third world country. Godwin writes in such a way that we can't help but find his homeland beautiful, even amidst the strife. He helps us to see the position of himself and his family, living in a country where your race could spell either life or death. His sister, Georgina, explains their parents situation well when she says, "if you put a frog in a shallow saucepan of water and heat up the water very slowly, the frog will never quite notice how hot it's getting. It won't actually jump out. Until it's too late. Until it's boiled alive." Godwin's conflicting emotions become more evident when he learns of his father's past, and his experience as a Jew in Nazi Poland. Armed with this revelation, hs attempts to make sense of his family's attachment to a place where being white could cost you your life.
Peter Godwin has created a memoir that transcends the conventional understanding of an account of one's life. He not only explains the problems among his own family, he intertwines them with the escalating violence and political corruption in Zimbabwe. He uses a very personal tone that not only highlights the injustice of the regime of Robert Mugabe, but also draws in the reader into connecting emotionally with Godwin and his family. He has written a powerful and deeply affecting book that helps us to appreciate our freedom, while at the same time painting the story of a family's struggle amidst a very dark and dangerous time in Africa.

Editorial Review:

After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downwards into the
jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in their allegiance to the failed state that has been their adopted home for 50 years.
Then Godwin discovered a shocking family secret that helped explain their loyalty. Africa was his father's sanctuary from another identity, another world.
WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN is a stirring memoir of the disintegration of a family set against the collapse of a country. But it is also a vivid portrait of the profound strength of the human spirit and the enduring power of love.

Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier

Alexandra Fuller

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 30 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Thomas Wolfe's trusted axiom about not being able to go home again gets a compelling spin through the African veldt in Alexandra Fuller's Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier. Fuller (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight : An African Childhood) journeys through modern Zambia, to battlefields in Zimbabwe and Mozambique with the scarred veteran of the Rhodesian Wars she identifies only as "K." Intrigued by the mysterious neighbor of her parent's Zambian fish farm and further enticed by her father's warning that "curiosity scribbled the cat" ("scribbling" is Afrikaans slang for "killing"), Fuller embarks on a journey that covers as much cratered psychic landscape as it does African bush country. Though she and "K" are both African by family roots rather than blood, she quickly discovers that 30 years of civil war have scarred them--and the indigenous peoples they encounter--in markedly different ways. "K" is a figure of monumental tragedy, a decent man torn by war-fueled rage, a failed marriage, and painful memories of an only son lost to tropical disease. His adopted Christianity offers him only partial absolution, and Fuller details his gut-wrenching confessions of quarter-century old atrocities with compassion and rare insight. Her prose liberally salted with a rich, melange of Afrikaans and local Shona slang, Fuller nonetheless struggles with a narrative whose turns are often unexpected, yet driven by humanity. There's a clear sense that the author's fitful journey into the past with "K" has opened as many wounds as it has healed, and spawned more questions than it has answered. It's that discomfort and frustration that often reinforces the honesty of her prose--and reinforces Thomas Wolfe's adage yet again. --Jerry McCulley

Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe's Future

Martin Meredith

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Robert Mugabe came to power in Zimbabwe in 1980 after a long civil war in Rhodesia. The white minority government had become an international outcast in refusing to give in to the inevitability of black majority rule. Finally the defiant white prime minister Ian Smith was forced to step down and Mugabe was elected president. Initially he promised reconciliation between white and blacks, encouraged Zimbabwe's economic and social development, and was admired throughout the world as one of the leaders of the emerging nations and as a model for a transition from colonial leadership. But as Martin Meredith shows in this history of Mugabe's rule, Mugabe from the beginning was sacrificing his purported ideals--and Zimbabwe's potential--to the goal of extending and cementing his autocratic leadership. Over time, Mugabe has become ever more dictatorial, and seemingly less and less interested in the welfare of his people, treating Zimbabwe's wealth and resources as spoils of war for his inner circle. In recent years he has unleashed a reign of terror and corruption in his country. Like the Congo, Angola, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Liberia, Zimbabwe has been on a steady slide to disaster. Now for the first time the whole story is told in detail by an expert. It is a riveting and tragic political story, a morality tale, and an essential text for understanding today's Africa.

A fully revised and updated edition of the book previously titled Our Votes, Our Guns

James and the Duck: Tales of the Rhodesian Bush War (1964 - 1980)

Faan Martin

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Subjects -> Entertainment -> Humor -> General
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Subjects -> History -> Africa -> Zambia

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A very different tongue-in-cheek personal account about a forgotten war. Between 1964 and 1980 Rhodesian men from all walks of life left their families and jobs to fight for their country. They were farmers, bankers, railwaymen, shopkeepers, miners and even Members of Parliament, who every six weeks, changed their soft civilian life for battle dress, rifles and grenades. These are their stories. It's not really about war heroes. It's more about bluestone charged, but still lustful troops coping with fighting terrorists, boredom, longing, fear and death. All this set against the background of Africa's sweltering heat, annoying insects, dangerous animals and venomous snakes. Definitely not for the faint-hearted. The reader will meet a long suffering prisoner-of-war, infantry soldiers, helicopter gunship pilots, tribesmen, pompous army officers, mercenaries and even a duck. Some of the personal incidents will have you laughing and crying at the same time. No matter how you view the Rhodesian Bush War, you will enjoy the humour and at times satire and even sadness of this true account of how men coped with the horrors and hardships of war.

Through the Darkness: A Life in Zimbabwe

Judith Garfield Todd

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Selected as one of The Economists Best Books of 2007! For more than three decades, Judith Todd has been at loggerheads with successive governments of Zimbabwe. After being jailed and then exiled by Ian Smith's regime, she returned to her country in 1980 and soon realised that, far from being the solution to Zimbabwe's ills, Robert Mugabe and Zanu (PF) were increasingly becoming the problem. As the country slid into social and economic decline, Todd's position as director of a local development agency gave her a unique vantage point from which to observe the increasing arrogance and cruelty of Zimbabwe's leaders and the suffering and struggles of ordinary citizens. Peopled with household names from diplomats and politicians to international correspondents and liberation leaders, Through the Darkness takes readers from the family ranch outside Bulawayo to Buckingham Palace, from the bowels of Zimbabwe's prisons to the inner sanctums of Mugabe's cabinet. It is also the story of the country's silenced people - their courage, their irrepressible humour, their hopes and their feelings of betrayal. Drawing from journals, letters and documents, this is a fascinating personal account of life in Zimbabwe

Where We Have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe

Andrew Meldrum

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Moved me deeply 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

As a Zimbabwean living abroad I sceptically picked up a copy of this book. I would read with dread Andrew Meldrums daily news reports on the dire and continually worsening situation in Zimbabwe on a Zimbabwean news website. I was very pleasantly surprised by the depth of feeling he developed for the country and his positive outlook in this book. I was moved by all his personal experiences and interactions with people there and the dangers he faced on a daily basis just doing his job. Someone needed to speak up and let the international community know about the teriible things that went happened in Zimbabwe from Gukurahundi to the farm invasions and I admire him for his bravery and perseverance. He chronicled our history from an eyewitness point of view and brought it all alive again. It allowed me to relive the 80's and 90's again. I cringe whenever I hear news of Zimbabwe on the television but this book made me feel proud to be Zimbabwean and I have recommended to my non-Zimbabwean friends as a way of understanding what happened to Zimbabwe. Excellent book!

Editorial Review:

Where We Have Hope is the gripping memoir of a young American journalist. In 1980, Andrew Meldrum arrived in a Zimbabwe flush with new independence, and he fell in love with the country and its optimism. But over the twenty years he lived there, Meldrum watched as President Robert Mugabe consolidated power and the government evolved into despotism. In May 2003, Meldrum, the last foreign journalist still working in the dangerous and chaotic nation, was illegally forced to leave his adopted home. His unflinching work describes the terror and intimidation Mugabe’s government exercised on both the press and citizens, and the resiliency of Zimbabweans determined to overturn Mugabe and demand the free society they were promised.

House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe

Christina Lamb

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Subjects -> History -> Africa -> Zimbabwe

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Blue mountains, golden fields, gin and tonics on the terrace--once it had seemed the most idyllic place on earth. But by August 2002, Marondera, in eastern Zimbabwe, had been turned into a bloody battleground, the center of a violent campaign. One bright morning, Nigel Hough, one of the few remaining white farmers, received the news he had been dreading. A crowd of war veterans was at his gates, demanding he hand over his homestead. The mob started a fire and dragged him to an outhouse. To his shock, the leader of the invaders was his family’s much-loved nanny Aqui. “Get out or we’ll kill you,” she said. “There is no place for whites in this country.”

Christina Lamb uncovered the astonishing saga she tells in House of Stone while traveling back and forth to report clandestinely on Zimbabwe. Her powerful narrative traces the history of the brutal civil war, independence, and the Mugabe years, all through the lives of two people on opposing sides. Although born within a few miles of each other, their experience growing up could not have been more different. While Nigel played cricket and piloted his own plane, Aqui grew up in a mud hut, sleeping on the floor with her brothers and sisters. “They had cars and went shopping in South Africa. We didn’t have food and had to walk an hour each way to fetch water,” she remembers.

House of Stone (“dzimba dza mabwe” or “Zimbabwe” in Shona) is based on a remarkable series of interviews with this white farmer and black nanny, set against the backdrop of the last British colony to become independent, and the descent into madness of Robert Mugabe, one of Africa’s most respected nationalist leaders.

Rhodesian Ridgeback (Pet love)

Ann Chamberlain

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Subjects -> Home & Garden -> Animal Care & Pets -> Dogs -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Named for the peculiar ridge on his back, the Rhodesian Ridgeback is a handsome and strong working dog originating from southern Africa, where he was used for big-game hunting. His clean, musculature, symmetrical outline and distinctive sighthound body endow the Ridgeback with impressive speed, power and endurance. This is a dog graced with intelligence, patience and a keen sense of humor, making him a delightful companion, brilliantly adapting to life as a pet and weekend sports dog.

The author's discussion of the breed standard and the breed's characteristics will prove useful to the novice and experienced owner alike. Comprehensive in its scope and up-to-date in its content, this book offers expert advice on the selection of a puppy, breed-specific health concerns, house-training and obedience training as well as everyday care maintenance, including feeding, grooming, exercise and safety considerations.

Whether you are a newcomer to the Rhodesian or a committed fancier showing and/or racing your dogs every weekend, this new breed guide promises to be an indispensable addition to your library.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Alexandra Fuller

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Excellent!! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I could hardly put this book down. It's the memoirs of a British girl growing up in Africa. Her story is absolutely fascinating. Highly recommended

Dogs Audio CD 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Alexandra Fuller is such a talented writer. I have read "Dogs" twice as it reminds me of my own African childhood. I have given it to friends who have loved it, so I decided it was time to listen to it on audio CD. I enjoyed it tremendously. Lisette Lecat's accents are wonderful and I could picture a young Bobo Fuller even more vividly than when I'd read the book. I found myself laughing in my car at times and couldn't wait to get back into the car so I could continue listening to Bobo's fascinating childhood story. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I am currently listening to Scribbling The Cat on audio CD.

Editorial Review:

In 1971, when Alexandra Fuller was two, her parents abandoned their life in England and returned to what was then Rhodesia, and to the beginning of a civil war. By the time she was eight, the war was at its height. While her father was away for long stretches, fighting on the side of the white government, her mother worked the family farm with a passionate determination fuelled by a ferociously deep love for Africa. Don't let's go to the dogs tonight is about living through a civil war and coming to a realisation that the side you have been fighting for may well be the wrong one. It is a story of optimism and faith; of one family's quixotic battle against nature and loss, and their unbreakable bond with a continent which came to define, shape, scar and heal them.