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When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa

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Author: Peter Godwin
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$14.99~~
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Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars

55 reviews
Sales Rank: 3588

Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.4 x 1

ISBN: 0316018716
Dewey Decimal Number: 968.9105
EAN: 9780316018715
ASIN: 0316018716

Publication Date: April 10, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW

Customer Reviews:

Showing reviews 6-10 of 55

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Heartwarming current situations / tragic future / unfolding history September 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

When A Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa is an exceptionally well-written book of Africa telling three stories simultaneously ... a universal, heartwarming story of caring for aging parents, the stark tragedy of the rendering of Zimbabwe / Southern Rhodesia civilization, and the real-time unfolding history of a reluctant father's long distant past.

Peter is an adult white child of British Africa, a competent reporter, a good observer, a good son, and an excellent writer in a remarkable situation with (at least) three major facets. Imagine being a husband / father of a family in New York trying to take care of aging parents who don't want to leave a country whose functioning society is literally being taken apart daily while your father via email is at long last beginning to clear up the mystery of his own ancestry and experiences as a young Jewish (a surprise) boy in 1939 with a different name (also a surprise) from a different European country than you had always been led to believe (another surprise). All over a 10-year period from the mid-1990's to the early 2000's and, of course, the public part of the story continues today.

A very, very good book, very highly recommended from lots of different viewpoints ... !!

5 out of 5 stars

appreciating life's complexities in the face of evil September 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

This was one of the most powerful, absorbing, moving and enlightening memoirs I've read in a long time. The way the author weaves his personal narrative in with an expose of the tragedy of life in zimbabwe under mugabe is masterful. His memoir is rich in details that reveal the complexities of his life, but he never loses the thread of his story. I can't read about southern Africa any more without conjuring up images from this book. I couldn't stop reading, and I didn't want the book to end.

4 out of 5 stars

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun A Memoir of Africa August 30, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

Peter Godwin has written a very good follow-up to MUKIWA. His personal account of his family's history in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe is honest and absorbing for a genre that can be self-serving. I hope others will learn from this book that politics are never black or white,just human.

5 out of 5 stars

Heart-breaking and deeply moving August 7, 2008
Peter Godwin was born in Rhodesia, and in 1996 he published 'Makiwa', a gripping account of how he grew up in that country. He was conscripted into the Rhodesian army to fight against the independence movement, by which time he felt that he was fighting in an unjust cause. He eventually got to England, became a journalist, and in 1981, now based in the United States, he returned to what in 1980 had become independent Zimbabwe, partly because his parents were still living there and partly because he loved the country and its people. But he now had to record that the new government of Robert Mugabe was more savage than the white government had been and was carrying out bloody suppression in Matabeleland - a sign of things to come. Godwin's reporting at that time made him persona non grata and he had to leave Zimbabwe again, though he was able to return after Mugabe had `stabilized' the country with the so-called Unity Accord in 1987.

This second volume, first published in 2006, is an account of several later visits, beginning with one in 1996. In the chapters relating to 1996, 1997 and 1998, Mugabe's dictatorship is not central to his account, though of course he is aware of it; but he is more concerned with the quite non-political aspects of his family's life. At this time Mugabe had not yet whipped up anti-white agitation. Indeed he had for years encouraged white people to stay and help the Zimbabwean economy. In fact, in the year 2000, "78% of white farmers were on property they had purchased after independence, only when that land had first been offered to -and turned down by - the government, as was required by law" (p.56).

Godwin's next visit was in 2000. That year Mugabe wanted to change the constitution to allow him another 12 years in power; and this change had to be ratified by a referendum. To get the new constitution accepted, he inserted in it a law allowing the seizure of white-owned farm land for redistribution to black peasants (though in fact most of it went to his cronies). His instrument for this were the so-called war veterans, and violence against whites now took off, under such thugs as those calling themselves `Hitler' Hunzvi and `Stalin Mau Mau'. When Mugabe lost the referendum, he unleashed violence also against Tsvangirai's newly created Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

In 2001 there was a total eclipse of the sun over Zimbabwe, and, unusually, there was another one in 2002. The folklore expression for this is that `a crocodile eats the sun', and it is considered the worst of omens. Godwin now chronicles in the most graphic manner the increasing horror of Mugabe's appalling regime and the descent of Zimbabwe into chaos and lawlessness: the ruin of agriculture; the displacement of millions of black farm workers; famine; the government's deliberate withholding of food supplies from areas where the opposition is strong; hyper-inflation; casual murders and robberies, with the police either unwilling to intervene or actually participating in them. Among the many grotesque vignettes: cemeteries plundered, patches of maize planted between the graves, and befouled with excrement; the RSPCA being given permission to evacuate tortured animals from farms - when their white owners are not allowed to leave their besieged homes. Godwin is there during the General Strike of 2003 and its brutal suppression.

But this is not only a journalist's book about Zimbabwe. It is also a touching story of a loving family. The scenes with his gallant and now impoverished, sick and aged parents - who, beleaguered as they are, refuse to leave Zimbabwe - are deeply moving. And there is an unexpected dimension. On a visit in 2001, when he is in his forties, Peter Godwin learns that his father, George, now 77, was not in fact the reserved Anglo-African he had always taken him to be, but was born a Polish Jew. Only now can George bring himself to talk and write about it. The revelation has an immense impact on his son, who inserts a couple of chapters to tell the story of George's Warsaw childhood, how, just before the war, he came to leave Poland as a teenager, without his family. George's mother and sister later perished in Treblinka. Peter Godwin had heard of Auschwitz and Belsen, but (somewhat surprisingly for a journalist) he had never heard of the other extermination camps, which he now researched and whose horrors he then describes.

This beautifully written book is a lament for Zimbabwe, but it is also a tribute to his parents, and it is dedicated to his father's memory.

5 out of 5 stars

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun July 30, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

Peter Godwin's book, titled above, is a very worth while read. In plain dialogue he lets the rest of the world know what is really going on in Zimbabwe in the most sensitive way possible through his own families lives. The book is beautifully written, I couldn't put it down once I started reading it, more especially after following the last fiasco of an election in June 2008. Why the other African nations let Mugabwe get away with what he is doing to his own people, is beyond me. Farms that were productive have now grown wild and uncultivated, and a country that was the bread basket of Africa is now one of the worlds poorest countries, except of course for the government fat cats. Well worth buying and reading

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