Non-Fiction Reviews – Page 12 – Books, Brews & Banter

Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, by Trevor Noah

When a book begins with a nine-year-old getting pushed out of a moving bus by his mother and ends up twenty years later with him hosting The Daily Show, you want to see what mysteries unfold in the middle.

Trevor Noah’s mother, who he calls a “force of nature,” is the one who shoved him out of the speeding minibus, jumping out with him—to protect both of them from a driver who showed serious intent to harm them both. And so begins the book about a young man who took after the mother he adored, refusing the rules intended to keep her, and him, in their proper places—whatever that was in South Africa’s system of apartheid that separated people by race to a degree that few understood. Chinese were colored, but Japanese were not, and Trevor, who had a white father and a Black mother, wasn’t considered colored, but mixed, an entirely different category, with different rules. Their union was illegal, so he literally was born a crime.

Obviously a bright child, Trevor learned to master the many languages and accents of his complex and diverse neighborhoods, including English, Zulu, German, Afrikaans, and Sotho, which gave him an advantage when getting mugged, cheated, criticized, conned, or when just wanting to communicate with somebody different.

Language, he writes, is part of a shared identity and “even more than color, defines who you are to people.” Language can unify and divide us, he says. This makes the story of his high school matric dance (prom) even more ironic. He wooed a girl for a month, considering her the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. When she agreed to go to prom with him, he spent a fortune getting the right outfit and planning the perfect night. He was late picking her up, then got lost, and they were two hours late to the dance. Once there, she refused to get out of the car, and he had no idea why. It turned out she was terrified of the whole chaotic situation, something she could not communicate because she did not speak English and her language, Pedi, was one of the few he couldn’t speak, a fact that somehow eluded him in his ill-fated courtship.

Much of the book is about how he tried to find his place as a light-skinned Black man, finally turning to comedy to try to make some sense of it. He was such a misfit, in fact, that at one point neighbors used him as a guidepost when giving directions: “The house on Makhalima Street. At the corner you’ll see a light-skinned boy. Take a right there.”

Noah’s mother, Patricia, had no interest in remaining a subjugated woman and living her life defined by White culture and Black men. She chose to have a child with a man of German-Swiss descent, with no plans of ever marrying him; she trained as a typist at a time when women were supposed to stay at home; and she moved into neighborhoods that were alternately dangerous or above her “station,” all to avoid staying in a small village or a small life.

Patricia was Trevor’s guiding light, foil to his escapades, greatest love and greatest challenge. His biological father remained in his life, even though that was not part of the original agreement and offered a touch of support from a distance. His stepfather Abel provided a model of the kind of man he did not want to be.

For her part, Patricia saw Jesus as her guide, and she and Trevor spent most of each Sunday going to three different churches—White church, Black church, and colored church, providing a framework for her faith, but demonstrating the divisive society in which they lived.

Trevor countered constant bullying with humor, which became his defense and led to a high- paying career. As a teenager, he was eating caterpillars to keep from starving, which he describes in appalling detail, while living in a garage or sleeping in cars every night and wearing clothes too big for him so they didn’t have to replaced so often. Now, at the age of 36 he is making $8 million a year.

The book is essentially an interwoven series of monologues that are harrowing, insightful, terrifying, sad, and, because of the telling, often funny. But there is nothing funny about the system of apartheid under which Trevor was born and the racism and classism in which he lived. Perhaps there will be a sequel to this, explaining how he ended up where he now is. Better yet, maybe his remarkable mother will write a book.

— Joe Kucera and Pat Prijatel

The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession and the Natural History Heist of the Century, by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Is this book autobiography? Memoir? Is it the story of a quest for the answers to an absorbing crime story with an uncertain ending? Is it scientific history? Answer: All of the above! In weaving together these several strands, this non-fiction tale led to provocative discussion.

Kirk Wallace Johnson opens his tale autobiographically: He’s suffering from PTSD in the aftermath of the war in Iraq. His current work, seeking to resettle Iraqi interpreters in the US, meets with limited success and constant frustration. To relieve his depression, he takes up fly-fishing. From his guide, he learns about fly-tying, the creation of beautiful works of art that are ostensibly for use as hooks to attract salmon. In reality, these salmon flies are almost never actually used to fish. They are bought and sold and hoarded as the works of art they are. Trouble is, however, that the “best” require the use of rare and expensive bird feathers, many from extinct or near-extinct birds.

As the author enters the world of the fly-tiers, he starts to hear of a theft from the British Museum’s ornithological collection held at the Tring Museum outside London. This theft was accomplished by a young man, barely out of his teens, named Edwin Rist. To explain not only the lure of the beautiful bird feathers that drew Rist to the heist, but also the scientific value of the birds taken, the author discovers the work of naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, who in the middle years of the 19th century, traversed the Malay Archipelago where he gathered and catalogued over 125,000 specimens of rare birds. His meticulous efforts to tag the date and location of each skin, as the bird carcasses are called, led him independently from Charles Darwin to arrive at the theory of evolution via natural selection.

But what of Edwin Rist? Rist is an American young man studying flute at the Royal Conservatory in London, hoping to be selected to play with a major European orchestra when his studies are completed. He is also an up-and-coming expert fly-tier, featured in the fly-tying world’s website as “the future of fly-tying.” He needs money to purchase the exotic bird feathers to use in tying his flies. His visit to the Tring museum awakens him to the possibilities of securing a supply of rare feathers for his own fly-tying and of a steady source of income from feather sales to other fly-tiers.

The subtitle speaks of obsession and there are many to examine in this book. There is, first, the scientific obsession of Alfred Russell Wallace, the collector of the specimens, who from his lower-class origins sought academic recognition that was at the time only granted to upper class Britons. There is Edwin Rist’s obsession with tying classic fishing flies that motivates the theft. And there is the author’s own obsession with the crime and with recovering feathers for the museum, an obsession that has therapeutic value in alleviating his PTSD symptoms.

Fly-tying with exotic feathers has exerted an obsessive pull on anglers and on pure hobbyists, with an upsurge of interest in the late 20th century. With that enthusiasm comes the obsessions that fuel an underground market in rare and often illegal feathers. Edwin Rist fell into this obsession as a young teenager. He was later arrested and tried for the theft, was found guilty but lightly punished with a short period of probation after pleading incapacity due to Asperger’s syndrome.

Many of our discussions were prompted by the judicial treatment of the case. Could the system do justice to all the interests of society? The police were essentially done when Rist was identified and tried. The prosecutor and judge felt limited by prior decisions on the Asperger defense. The museum’s interest waned when the specimens that were recovered were missing their sourcing tags or had been cut into marketable parts. The general silence of the “feather underground” made it more difficult to track the fate of the specimens. What do we think should have been a just punishment or a restorative action imposed on Edwin Rist? And could he have pulled this off alone?

Where does the value of the specimens to the scientific community collide with the value of the birds as objects of true beauty that the public might want to see? Fly-tiers ask: “Why does the Museum need so many examples of the same bird anyway?”

The Feather Thief is a good read, provocatively posing questions to which different readers might well derive different answers.

— Jeanie and Bill Smith

In The Garden of Beasts:Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson

This solidly researched account of Germany and the U.S. before World War II reads like a novel full of intigue, love affairs, disloyalty, honor, dishonor, evil, and power. Erik Larson tells the story from the unique perspective of the American ambassador from 1933-1938, William Dodd, and his family. Dodd was a scholar who was looking for an ambassadorship simply because he wanted to finish his three-volume book on the Old South. He ended up in Berlin because nobody else wanted the job—a fact he didnt realize until he was committed to the position.

Dodd was a Jeffersonian Democrat who chose to live on a budget and walk to work instead of being chauffered about in a giant gas guzzler, as was the custom of ambassadors. He remained a misfit during his entire time in Germany because he was not one of the wealthy elites who normally fill such posts. Initially, he argued away the threat of Hitler and the Nazi party, but ultimately he tried to warn the Roosevelt administration of the reality of Hitler’s danger to Germany and to the world. He was deemed an alarmist by his “colleagues” in Washington, and his warnings were dismissed as the work of an academic unqualified for diplomatic work.

Larson demonstrates how America and the German people might have stopped the pure evil that descended on Germany, but they chose to leave it to others, thinking it would get better on its own. Worse, many Americans at the time excused Hitler’s most despicable acts, reasoning that Jews caused their own problems.

Larson researched hundreds of books, artices, and newsreels, but relied heavily on Dodd’s papers and on his and his daughter’s autobiographies. The daughter, Martha Dodd, was a notorious partier who had affairs with Germans, Russians, and anybody in between. She was blindsided by Nazi charm, until their crimes became too obvious for her to ignore. Her story is a juicy counterpoint to her father’s more staid approach.

Larson shows the complexities of the era, creating in Dodd a character who has the guts to publicly decry Nazi policy, but who remains somewhat naive about the political web he’s caught in. Likewise, Larson makes clear that, while many Germans remained complacent and complicit in Hitler’s evil, some even within the Nazi hierarchy tried to work against Hitler.

After Dodd was replaced as Ambassador, he toured the country, warning Americans of the true evil of Hitler’s regime. Even then, he was often seen as exaggerating.

—Pat Prijatel