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Hi everyone today I'm here to talk about
"Born a Crime" which is a memoir by Trevor Noah.
You might have heard of Trevor Noah from
his late-night talk show and as a
stand-up comedian. I personally didn't
know very much about him going into this
book which is fine, I think, because A.)
you learn a lot about him in the book
and B.) nothing that he talks about is
contingent on you knowing things about him.
In fact i really enjoyed learning about
him and kind of meeting him and
understanding his point of view and
where he came from through listening to
this book, which i will say, i listened to
the audiobook and i would highly
recommend it.
I'll talk about the narration and
everything I liked about the book after
a brief synopsis. so Trevor Noah is, like
I said, a late-night talk show host and
comedian. he was born in south africa in
the years of the apartheid, and he was
born from a black mom and a white dad,
which at the time of his birth was
literally a crime. people between races
were not allowed to have relationships,
and so he was born a mixed-race child in
apartheid South Africa, which was a crime.
so he was a very unusual child in the
sense that he was one-of-a-kind pretty
much everywhere he went. it was not
something that people saw a lot, so he
stood out, and he talks about that how it
affected him growing up, kind of being
set apart from everyone, and how that
made him sometimes popular and sometimes
very unpopular. in the book he talks
about stories from his childhood and jumps
around a lot.
he talks about his mother and their
relationship, which is really close, and
them going to church together, and about
his father and his future stepfather and
those kind of male relationships. he
talks about the friends he makes, about
how he tries to fit in at school;
it covers a wide range of topics and a
lot of experiences of his life. so
talking about the narration-- I listened
to the audiobook and i can't recommend
it enough. he is one of the most
effortless and casual narrators. i love
when celebrities or any memoir writer
read their own book because obviously it's
their story, having them tell it
themselves just adds another layer of
sort of intimacy. but also no one can
really read the story like they've
written it themselves, so it's nice to
listen to him read it to you. it really
felt like just sitting down and someone
telling you their life. but on top of
that, not only do you get his life
experiences and these events
he's relying to you, but he also weaves
in a lot of history and kind of
cultural and political information about
South Africa before and after the
apartheid, which I found fascinating.
because i really don't know much about
that time period. obviously most people
know about it and have heard of it and
nelson mandela and all these big kind of
broader themes and looking at it from
sort of the lens of history. but I found
it really interesting to hear about
these things through the lens of a
person living in it, especially a person
from such a unique perspective. since he
is a comedian i also found it to be very
funny. i was laughing from like the first
chapter on. even in the darkest moments
of the story when he's talking about
really difficult things, issues of racism
or struggling with the relationship with
his stepfather who was very abusive, all
of these things-- in the funny moments and
in the dark moments-- he is able to find
humor and relay that in a very natural
way. I think sometimes humor can come
across very forced;
when people are trying to be funny, and
especially writing... so maybe listening to
that elevated it. but hearing him, not
tell jokes per se, but just deliver these
stories in a humorous way at times, it
was really enjoyable. i was laughing out
loud while listening to this in my car.
and I was also like very moved by some
of the more heartbreaking and scarier
moments of the stories. when he's
talking about being put in jail, being
racially profiled things like that was
really interesting to learn about and
really difficult. there are some moments
where it's talking about, especially his
mother, and things that she tries to do
as a black woman in South Africa at
the time, and she's just prohibited from
doing simply because of her race and
gender that are like so infuriating. and
to see them through the lens of the
mother's child and through a real person
was so much more enlightening than just
reading about it like in a newspaper or online.
you hear these headlines and you see
these things happening all over the
world, but to be able to hear them told
from someone who's lived through it, witnessed it and experience it
was like such a different level of
experience than just hearing about it, if
that makes sense. so I got a lot more out
of this book that i was expecting to.
it was funny; it was heartbreaking; again his
narration was just fantastic.
the only thing i didn't really love
about it is that it jumped around a lot,
like i said. so in one chapter he'd be in
elementary school and the next he'd be a teenager.
it just didn't feel thematically like
there was any sort of flow, and that's
fine. i mean it is called I think "stories
from a South African childhood" so it's
just different stories from his life.
sometimes it was hard to jump from one
time period to the other, and one chapter
is talking about how he didn't have any
friends and then the next chapter is
talking about his best friend. so it was
just kind of like confusing, but I get
that they took place in different time
periods. and I understand why he saved
the very last chapter of this book for
the end, which is really an amazing
chapter. I thought that he started and
ended the book on amazing notes; it got
me hooked from the very beginning and it
ended perfectly, and a lot of amazing
moments in between with a few that were
kind of like jarring, when he was
talking about things that I was not
expecting based on the chapter before it.
so that's my only criticism. I really
like this book and again i can't
recommend the audiobook enough. if you're
interested in this at all I would say go
the audiobook route, but if you don't
like audiobooks for some reason,
obviously I'm sure it'd be a great
experience to read too. i just think it's
a great story.
it's one of those celebrity memoirs that
I feel like really holds up to more than
just spilling secrets or writing about
their life because they're famous. I feel
like he actually has something to say
with his life experiences, and more on
top of that with how he talks about race
and politics. so there's a lot going on
in this but it never feels long. it was like
eight and a half hours, which is kind of long
for a celebrity memoir. i feel like
they're usually shorter than regular
audio books. but eight and a half hours is
a really good length for this. i would
have listened to a few more hours.
i thought he was really interesting and
easy to listen to, like i said, and i love
this book. so if you have not read this
book i can highly recommend it. if you
have, let me know what you thought about
it in the comments below. and i hope you
guys enjoyed this video and learned
something new, and I will see you in the
next one. bye!