Rating: 
Summary: an intemperate story, an intemperate climate
Review: Alexandra Fuller writes well. Her story of growing up in Africa is an unusual one, and would survive by being character-driven as well as landscape-driven, but due to her well-thought out metaphors and her honest portrayal through the eyes of the child and adolescent that she was, the story flourishes. Her book is despairing, encouraging, cynical, innocent, as varied and buzzing with life as its tropical setting.
It was a rough life, with tropical diseases and snakes and political upheaval. Likes so many British colonials, her parents were heavy smokers, drinkers, and partiers. Her father was ever-optimistic: If things didn't work out, they would move on. Her mother, an animal lover, was good to the natives (she ran a weekly medical clinic out of her kitchen back door) but hotly resented the natives' victory over British rule when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. Her mother bore five children but lost three to disease and accidents, and became mentally unstable for a time.
I notice from the back cover notes that Fuller now lives in Wyoming, which strikes me as fitting. One could hardly expect someone with her hardscrabble, adventurous background to become a tame big-city dweller.
Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding account of a white family's life in black Africa
Review: This is one of the most interesting books I've ever read. The events that take place are remarkable and unusual for most people. She does not seem to cover up or obscure anything, so it was like being a fly on the wall of the Fuller's home. The writing style is unique and interesting. The worst thing about this book is that it had to end. I was so caught up in it that I would have enjoyed reading about she and her family's life after she left Africa. If I had to offer one suggestion for future printings, it would be to include a glossary of African language and slang words that were used. Though it almost always was easy to guess the meaning of these words, sometimes it was not and would have been helpful to have had a glossary.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting Story From An Unusual Childhood
Review: As one might expect, a tale of a child growing up amid a vicious bush war in Africa would be interesting and this book is definately that. Ms. Fuller lists the traumas of life in Rhodesia during the war including her parents warning her not to startle them or they might shoot her, a policeman warning her and other children not to pick up gaily decorated packages because they could be booby-trapped, and other harrowing tidbits. However, in spite of everything, she and her family survived which is a testament to their strength of spirit. I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in that period.
Rating: 
Summary: Wild Romantic Africa?
Review: For all you potenetial readers who are like me, students of Africa and African literature, don't make the mistake of being mislead by the subtitle: An African Childhood. Africa is a large contintent made up of over 50 countries and several hundred ethnic groups. In the South and the East where the soil is rich and the material benefits large, white settlers can still be found. Fuller conflated a particular white settler Rhodesian childhood with African somehow. Like the South African afronaut, this is a silly claim and misleading if you are truly seeking to read a book on Africa and Africans.On the plus side, she loves animals and gives nice descriptions of the non-human native life forms.
Rating:
Summary: Riveting and unpretentious
Review: If there's one thing Alexandra Fuller can do, it's write. This unsentimental memoir of a white African childhood on various hardscrabble farms from 1972 to 1990, amidst periods of "unrest," including Rhodesia's long struggle against white rule, captivates as it horrifies. With humor and unflinching honesty, Fuller immerses the reader in the welter of smells, searing heat, torrential rains and myriad dangers from man, animal and plantlife. Her opening:
"Mum says, 'Don't come creeping into our room at night.'
They sleep with loaded guns beside them on the bedside rugs. She says, 'Don't startle us when we're sleeping.'
'Why not?'
'We might shoot you.'
'Oh.'
'By mistake.'
'Okay.' As it is, there seems a good enough chance of getting shot on purpose. 'Okay, I won't.' " With these few lines, Fuller captures her tone - fluctuations of fear, bewilderment and humor. Her story is told primarily in present tense from her childhood point of view, though she skips around in chronology in order to follow theme threads: school, war, poverty, her mother's alcoholism and unpredictability. Her mother, Nicola, is ferocious, larger than life; a woman who can drag her daughter off without breakfast to spend the day on horseback rounding up wild cows or laze away a rainy day sprawled with both daughters on her bed reading. A woman whose manic-depressive tendencies were exacerbated by the heartbreaking deaths of three of her five children and exaggerated by alcohol. She's brave, unpredictable, loving and scary. Racism in Fuller's world is a given, unquestioned by the child who sasses her nanny by threatening to fire her. Her parents are so poor they sell Nicola's rings each planting season and redeem them at harvest. Yet they have a houseful of servants and field hands. One day, her mother out, Fuller is bitten by something on her "downthere." Despite her terrified wailing, her black nanny refuses to aid her. When Nicola finally arrives, she drags the child inside, exasperated, and warns her, " 'Never, ever pull down your shorts in front of an African again." Fuller concludes the incident: "That's how I remember Karoi. And the dust-stinging wind blowing through the mealies on a hot, dry September night....And the beginning of the army guys: men in camouflage, breaking like a ribbon out of the back of an army lorry and uncurling onto the road, heads shaved, faces fresh and blank. Men cradling guns. And the beginning of men not in camouflage anymore, looking blank-faced, limbs lost." There's a dark, manic hilarity to much of the book - the teenage Fuller crossing the border on her way to boarding school, her mother comatose from an all-night drunk. "Dad nods, smokes. I crush out my cigarette. We're both hoping Mum doesn't say anything to get us shot." There are also gut-wrenching tragedies and moments of abject terror. The death of a sibling, her parents' grief-addled drunken driving, war. And there is Africa, a place of extremes, a place full of noises, smells and weather to make the rest of the world tame and drab in comparison, a place Fuller captures lovingly in her vivid, muscular, poetic prose.
Rating:
Summary: Not "White Mischief"
Review: In this African "Angela's Ashes", Fuller puts together not only a searing and unsentimental account of what amounts to very nearly a 'poor white' childhood (a useful antidote to those who think of white Africans as invariably wealthy and privileged), but also does not shirk her responsibility to deal with the realities of the historical situation in which she grew up. The uncompromising honesty of her account militates against the popular image of colonial Africa as the playground of the effete characters of "White Mischief" and "Out of Africa", and she describes her parents' struggle to survive in an increasingly hostile continent not only with an unblinking realism but also with an understanding and affection which takes us into the heart of what it was like to be white on a black continent in the last days of the colonial era. She shows the much-mentioned racism of her parents to have been embedded in the circumstances of the time and place, a racism perhaps better designated as a type of paternalism which has Mum dispensing medicines and care despite a total lack of medical training, encouraging the minimal schooling initiatives possible at the time on a poor farm in the heart of the bush, and responding to the repeated emergencies of the moment among the workers on the farms they inhabit with energy and a degree of self-sacrifice which is seldom recognised or valued in the current take on the last days of white power. Fuller is utterly successful in uncovering the depth of passionate commitment to Africa and its land and people which fuels these actions. Her parents - despite illness, nervous breakdowns, and an assortment of other disasters - stay on in Africa into old age; and each time she returns to visit them, the continent in all its corruption and poverty and extremes of need and beauty and hostility speaks to her anew - "the incongruous, lawless, joyful, violent, upside-down, illogical certainty of Africa comes at me like a rolling rainstorm, until I am drenched with relief." Fuller writes of life, unmediated, simple, at the edge of disaster, and lets us know how possible it is to survive and become fully human in such contexts - surely reassuring, surely a cause for celebration. But then, perhaps only those who have lived through something similar will be able to fully appreciate the flavor of this extraordinary book.
Rating:
Summary: Not "White Mischief"
Review: In this African "Angela's Ashes", Fuller not only puts together a searing and unsentimental account of what amounts to a 'poor white' childhood (a useful antidote to those who think of white Africans as invariably wealthy and privileged), but also does not shirk her responsibility to deal with the realities of the historical situation in which she grew up. The uncompromising honesty of her account militates against the popular image of colonial Africa as the playground of the effete characters of "White Mischief" and "Out of Africa", and she describes her parents' struggle to survive in an increasingly hostile continent with both an unblinking realism and an understanding and affection which takes us into the heart of what it was like to be white on a black continent in the last days of the colonial era. She shows the much-commented-upon racism of her parents to have been embedded in the circumstances of the time and place, a racism perhaps more accurately understood as a type of paternalism, which has Fuller's extraordinary Mum dispensing medicines and care to all comers despite a total lack of medical training, supporting and facilitating the minimal schooling initiatives possible at the time on a poor farm in the heart of the bush, and responding to the repeated emergencies of the moment among the workers on the farms they inhabit with energy and a degree of self-sacrifice which was not uncommon at the time, but which is seldom recognised or valued in the current take on the last days of white power. Fuller is utterly successful in uncovering the depth of passionate commitment to Africa and its land and people which fuels these actions. Her parents - despite illness, nervous breakdowns, and an assortment of other disasters - stay on in Africa into old age; and each time she returns to visit them, the continent in all its corruption and poverty and extremes of need and beauty and hostility speaks to her anew - "the incongruous, lawless, joyful, violent, upside-down, illogical certainty of Africa comes at me like a rolling rainstorm, until I am drenched with relief." Fuller writes of life, unmediated, simple, at the edge of disaster, and lets us know how possible it is to survive and become fully human in such contexts - surely reassuring, surely a cause for celebration. But then, perhaps only those who have lived through something similar will be able to fully appreciate the flavor of this extraordinary book.
Rating:
Summary: What does it mean to be an African?
Review: I picked up this book after reading various doom-and-gloom essays about 2002 politics in Zimbabwe. I thought the book might offer something other than a political diatribe from one party line or another. I was right about the lack of political commentary. For a while, it looked like it would have very little to say about Africa, at all. On one level, it is just the memoir of private family tragedy from the perspective of a 5 year old. The dedication page reads "to Mum, Dad, and Vanessa and to the memory of Adrian, Olivia and Richard with love". So, from page one, I was asking myself, who were Adrian, Olivia and Richard? Why did they die? Given this is touted as a 'war story,' I figured it involved battle deaths, but no, it's all family tragedy, stuff that could happen anywhere. The author constantly maintains the voice of appropriate maturity to the age she experienced the episode. Often, this is accomplished by stringing together olfactory metaphors. The following is from page 3. The episode is titled 'Rhodesia, 1975.' The auther is 6. "So if I wake in the night and need Mum and Dad, I call Vanessa, because she isn't armed. "Van! Van, hey!" I hiss across the room until she wakes up. And then Van has to light a candle and escort me to the loo, where I pee sleepily into the flickering yellow light and Van keeps the candle high, looking for snakes and scorpions and baboon spiders. ... the breeze has trapped midday scents; the prevalent cloying of the leach field, the green soap which has spilled out from the laundry and landed on the patted-down red earth, the wood smoke from the fires that heat our water, the boiled meat smell of dog food. We debate the merits of flushing the loo." This is a good example of how the author weaves the 'war' into a story of childhood memories. It is just part of the landscape. She can't go get in bed with her parents because her Dad might shoot whoever startles him. With this protective screen of childhood innocence and family tragedy, we are offered a glimpse of what it is like to be an African. I hope no one minds me calling the author an African. Deciding whether of not she is African seems to be the internal debate that strings together the episodes. That's what I was looking for and I appreciate the journey. I would have edited out the last 30 pages. There is no need to tidy up the loose threads to the story and the author un-wisely abandons her style of speaking from the 'era.' Here is the sentence I would have ended the book upon: "That night, the first night on our new farm [in Zambia], while I am sitting on the edge of my bed contemplating my new bedroom, a rat the size of a small cat runs over my foot."
Rating:
Summary: MUST if U grew up in Africa OR want 2 know what it was like
Review: This book is written with heart, honesty and love for a continent and its people. I have to admit not being able to put this book down! I have lived in a number of countries as a child and the way that this wonderful author has captured her childhood and the aspects and angles of both her youth and the countries that she lived in, cannot be discribed in any other way other then 'perfection' (it took be back many times). A fatastic book, which revels some very intimate secrets of an era and genre gone by. Thank you very much for an excellent piece of literature.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book that will make you laugh and cry
Review: I found this book after falling in love with Africa reading The Poisonwood Bible. I was even happier when I discovered it was the true story of "Bobo's" childhood experiences growing up in Rhodesia during a civil war. I couldn't put it down and even before I finished it, I started reading it over from the beginning. The personal photos add a nostalgic touch to each chapter and make the descriptions in the book come to life. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a roller coaster of emotional experiences and an exceptional read.
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