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Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"But the real world doesn't go away. Racism exists. People are getting hurt, and just because it's not happening to you doesn't mean it's not happening."

Eye-opening and raw, this book changed my perspective, gave me something to think about, and educated my mindset about systemic racism in ways that I haven't known before. I had physical reactions of laughs of dark comedy, gasps of chilling shock, and tears leaking from my eyes.

Noah is the host of The Daily Show, and although he didn't touch upon that part of his life, he implements excellent dark comedy and musings into these pages, and I loved every word of it. I just hope that he writes another book soon, because I want more from him as a writer.

This is one of the best memoirs that I've read this year, and that's saying a lot because memoirs are one of my favorite genres, and this one came from a powerful narrative. <
Trevor Noah grew under the reign of apartheid in South Africa for his whole young life, and he describes the every-day various experiences that he had to go through. As a poor bi-racial boy who was raised by a strong bad-ass single mom, he describes details that he remembers from his life. He's the offspring of a Swiss father To be perfectly honest, some of them were unimaginable to my privileged brain, which made his life story that more fascinating. It felt absolutely miraculous to experience life from someone else's viewpoint that I've been ignorant about.

As a student of history, I thought that this had some heavy historical themes, but that was wall engraved from Noah's perspective walking through his life. And I wasn't aware of the specific history in South Africa, they don't teach that to us in school. But I think that I now see Africa differently than before reading this book, and that makes this experience completely worthwhile and valuable of my time.

The thing is, that even though this book deals with some very tough issues since the first page, this book was very readable and enjoyable to me. Because it's written in essay format, it doesn't go chronologically from event to event, instead focuses on the themes that Noah wants to display.

I think that this is a discussion that we needs to continually be having, especially in this political climate and so this is the perfect book to read to open that door for discussion.

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