Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful, wonderful book!
Review: Ms. Fuller raises colorfully vivid images of an Africa that, despite all it's drawbacks, she is clearly still passionate for. Her descriptive recollections are rich with sensory details that bring her experiences to life. Elements like color, sound, scent, texture, movement, feeling, thought, temperature and so on, that when entwined, allow one to live the event for themself. Basically, she makes it possible to comfortably experience her frequently inhospitable Africa. All this she achieves with a relaxed manner and with an understanding, warmth, and humor that had me thinking over and over again how cool it would be to be her friend. I highly recommend the book!
Rating: 
Summary: Step into the third world and love it!
Review: I've had the pleasure of reading many of Bo's editorials and love her observant, funny, true-to-life style, so, I snatched this up as soon as I got wind of it. This memoir is richly textured with both emotional and flat impressions of life as a minority white growing up in black, poor Africa while the family tries to maintain that illusion of supremacy that all good Englishman possess. Many black readers are probably surprised to find themselves living through the eyes of a white child but it is so real that I finished feeling I'd just returned from a journey that will never leave my soul.
Rating:
Summary: Growing up an "Expat"
Review: The Panama I grew up in the 1960's and '70's was a third world country. It was nothing like "Bobo's" war-torn Africa. However, when I heard Alexandra Fuller on the radio, talking about her book, I instantly related to the sense she conveyed of being a child of the first world, growing up in a third world that has now vanished. I think of it as a time when the last vestiges of colonial life were disappering.Anyway, I immediately ordered her book. I was not disappointed. In a very direct and personal way, Ms. Fuller conveys what it was like living in a developing country amidst expatriates and indigenous peoples. The book immediately brought back the wonder and richness, and contrasts of a childhood in such a place. Contrasts: Much of what Ms. Fuller describes of the natural beauty of Africa reminds me of the Panamanian interior. On the other hand, like Bobo, I had to learn to operate a battle rifle at an early age because there were people who wanted my father and family dead. This wonderful book also reminded me of the costs of such a life to many people I knew growing up; costs paid in alcoholism, mental and illness and other great losses. I finished the book knowing I would feel very much at home having more than a few beers with Bobo and her family. Notwithstanding their trials, or perhaps because of them, Bobo and Van, like most of my friends, apparently grew up to be fine adults. This book conveys some great truths about commitment, love, family, the wonder of childhood, ordeal and triumph. I recommend it heartily.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: I was also struck by the mixed reaction to this wonderful book. I am also amused at how easily we use the words rascist and racism - almost like food labels, salt or pepper? The one star folks are made uncomfortable by the book. They see it as presenting a piece of the African story they had rather not imagine. They miss the point. Ms. Fuller's book, a sort of Angela's Ashes mixed with Out of Africa, is enjoyable because it is not judgemental or romanticized. It is the story of a family's life with all the warts and blemishes. It is funny, sad, shocking, heroic, amazing, eccentric, and at time unsettling. Hurray for her.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs an intelligent publisher
Review: This very well written book appears to have been issued by a publisher who doesn't understand publishing. This book could have become a classic, but it will sink from view because of its unmemorable, difficult to pronounce title. The poor cover also suggests that this publisher doesn't know how to market books. Writers getting published for the first time seem to have no idea how important it is to choose a publisher who knows what it's doing.
Rating:
Summary: Experience the Raw Smells Tastes Sounds and Sights of Africa
Review: Reading through the customer reviews of this book was a revelation. To date, they are all either 5 stars or 1 star, nothing in between. I wondered, how could there be such great disparity? So, being on the 5 stars side, I tried to study exactly what made some dislike this work so intensely. I can only discern that those who were so negative seem to have wanted Ms. Fuller to tell another story, to show some other side of Africa. However, this was her life as she lived it and as she saw it. After all, what else is a biography? I found her story entertaining, informative, startlingly honest, and seemingly free of political motive. I agree, that this portrayal of Africa is only her truth and others may see something entirely different, but her truth is all she has to tell, and it is as important and relevant as anyone else's truth. That said, I would read this book for the marvelous descriptions alone! From the first page, she wakes up all five senses with a full-force whammy and never lets them idle for a minute.
Rating: 
Summary: house of stone crumbles
Review: It's very difficult for someone to say of a book with little to no vision or perspective, that it is good. You sit and read this book and are frustrated by the complete lack of focus. Why was Fuller writing this and for whom? DLGTTDT is considered a memoir but it fails even there as all you get is a continuous loop of alcoholic mom (but boy is she funny or what?), racial epithets, pictures of the "natives" (there're other less nice names for them)and other pastiche from the well-worn world of colonial english literature. About those natives. We have pictures of them in their "native environment," quiet and meekly smiling for Ms. Fuller's camera and yet no recording of their voice. Well why stick their photographs in without a mention of who they are? One can only speculate and again that brings us back to that shop worn world of romantic Africa in the English tradition. It's bewildering. Obviously Alexandra Fuller realizes how empty in fact her account was and how incomplete, superficial and wanting. She neither succeeds in telling her own story and certainly not the story of Zimbabwe during the period in which her family lived as settlers. This is very unfortunate. No doubt she has something to say but for some reason is unable to say it.
Rating:
Summary: dazzling, honest memoir
Review: A gorgeously written, often hugely funny, painfully honest memoir of growing up white in Africa, of growing up with driven, occasionally self-destructive, and (yes) racist parents--and yet a loving heartfelt portrait of a time and place and a family. What some reviewers here don't seem to be able to forgive is that Alexandra Fuller is not black. Thus, they seem to be saying, she has no right whatsoever to her writing, to her point of view. Sorry, but that's not fair. Readers with less agenda and more open minds will see this book for what it is: one of the best memoirs of recent years.
Rating:
Summary: Africa
Review: I remember author and humanist, Chinua Achebe explaining the importance of literature to the world you lived in. He didn't see how it was possible to just write for the sake of writing. I thought of Fuller's book when I went back to that speech Achebe made. If "Don't Let's..." is a journal and for whatever reason, depth or understanding or historical perpsective was not something to aim for, then why such a muddled project? The native Zimbabwean people are completely absent from this book and we get a weak colonial portrait about funny times, mosquitoes and animals. This is old nineteenth century Byronic romance and unforgiveable today in a world where we all now know better. I would reiterate the importance of reading more perceptive and less narcissitic Southern African writers such as Bessie Head and Tsitse. ALexandra Fuller's book does nothing to convince the rest of us that Africans are human beings and that the people of Zimbabwe have something of worth to tell us and to teach us.
Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: Not at all what I expected. I thought this book would be an apologetic narrative. Instead, it read more like a young girl's journal, focusing on her family's poverty, the natural dangers of farm living in South Africa, war, government corruption, alcoholism, loss, and animals. The author does not shy away from reflecting on attitudes and prejudices, and does not get caught up trying to rationalize apartheid. It was a very good read, and some parts were almost poetic in descriptiveness. Beautifully told, but the ending sort of dozed off.
|
