Jessica Jeffers's Reviews > Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

Within the first twenty pages of this book, I regretted just two days earlier writing the sentence “Trevor Noah, while smart and funny, doesn't feel like a must-watch” while lamenting how much I miss Jon Stewart.

This is perhaps the most remarkable celebrity memoir I’ve ever read. I am a hyperbolic person by nature, but I’m really hard pressed to remember one that’s made this big an impression on me. Not just because of the content--which is at times heartbreaking and mindblowing--but also because of the humor and warmth with which Trevor Noah’s managed to convey some very difficult life experiences.

Born in South Africa in the mid '80s, Trevor Noah’s very existence as a biracial child was illegal. Even though apartheid fell while he was still a child, he faced unique challenges due to his ill-defined racial identity. He stood out as light-skinned in the poverty stricken black neighborhoods, but that didn’t mean that he was spared the poverty or the prejudice faced by anyone who wasn’t white.

Noah introduces each of his stories with a little bit of background information on the political climate and culture of South Africa. Then he describes different phases of his life through that lens, looking at how his childhood friendships, early attempts at romance, and a sometimes turbulent family life: His mother remained single by choice until Noah was around 10, then she married a man with a violent temper and he lost touch with his birth father.

It’s not all bleak, though. Some of the stories are just about the hi-jinks that a teenaged Noah got into with his friends. It should not surprise you to know that he was a bit of a troublemaker and a hustler in his youth.

But even when he’s describing some unimaginable difficulties, Noah managed to make me laugh SO MUCH. His solution to his fear of using an outhouse shared by several other families in his grandmother’s neighborhood? Ridiculous. The time that he didn’t realize that his date to the school dance didn’t speak the same language as him? Hilarious. His response to his mother throwing him out of a moving vehicle because she was afraid that the driver of the minibus was going to kill them? Shouldn’t be funny, but it was.

But, the story that killed me was the one where he realized just how problematic his friend Hitler’s name is.

This is the kind of book that knocked my worldview around a little bit. I always knew that, yes, life under apartheid was hard, but Noah showed me just how hard, in a very visceral and personal way. He also showed how the shadow of apartheid lingered long after Nelson Mandela walked free, something that’s easy to forget. But what he really does so well here is demonstrate the power of human resilience. He gives so much credit to his mother, which seems to phenomenally deserved. But as amazing a portrait as he paints of her, I’m left with a newfound respect for Trevor’s own ability to overcome and succeed against the odds. And to do so with a straight head and an amazingly funny sense of humor? Blows my mind. I gotta start watching The Daily Show every night again.