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Trevor Noah: "Born a Crime"

This smash-hit book *does* have flaws.

(1) Trevor Noah re-teams with his father, who has been more or less absent for many years. Noah--eager to give his father the benefit of the doubt--presents us with a rose-colored, humorous account of the reunion. But something is missing. Where the hell was the dad for years and years and years? Noah--eager to put a tidy bow on a story--doesn't tell us all we need to know, and he doesn't really confront a sense of anger, a feeling that must be within him, somewhere.

(2) Noah has a great story about shoplifting with a friend. There's grainy mall-camera footage, and the footage clearly captures Noah's features. But--because the camera erases evidence of race--no security official is able to see that Noah is Noah. Everyone watches and says, That kid doesn't seem to be Noah's "color," so he can't be Noah. A fine allegory about human stupidity--but something is again missing here. Noah sells his friend down the river; the friend is expelled from school, and Noah skips off scot-free. Noah's unwillingness to examine this--and to examine the feelings around it--seems a bit chilling, at the least.

All that said, this memoir really is the game-changer Michiko Kakutani described in her review. Noah's life is extraordinary. In childhood, he is thrown from a moving vehicle so that he can escape some potential murderers. In adulthood, he watches his mother fight for her life after her abusive husband has shot her in the head.

Noah has deep curiosity about human behavior and human structures, and particularly about apartheid, and he is able to use humor as a kind of weapon. With strong irony, he writes of his "admiration" for the architects of apartheid, because they designed a system "so effective in achieving what it set out to achieve." (This sense of irony might remind you of Amy Schumer. Ms. Schumer knows it's best not to be solemn when you want to change the world. See, for example, her work on Bill Cosby, or her famous discussion of rape culture, "Football Town Nights." A milestone and major inspiration for me. Something I'd like to have streamed at my funeral.)

It's literally--literally!--astonishing that someone could be born in the circumstances that "nurtured" Trevor Noah--and still become an international sensation. It's a story that needed to be a book. And now here you go. Recommended reading.
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