Fuller wakes up the dogs in her sometimes politically incorrect, always honest memoir of growing up white...

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	• Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood Alexandra Fuller Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 180 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Remembering Zambia

We can recommentd this book to anyone who has lived in Zambia during and post UDI. We have sent copies to our friends in UK who were with us during our stay there. We all know people who we can relate to with the characters in this book. The story took us all back to places like the "Elephant's Head" in Kabwe - a stop on our treks to Lusaka from Ndola.

Fascinating setting, frustrating storytelling

This memoir really brings its setting to life. It pulses with the sights, smells and sounds of Africa, and does a great job describing civil war, droughts, dysentery, fleas, floods, poachers, scorpions, terrorists and very bad roads. I actually cringed when I read how the putzi flies lay eggs on clothes, which then burrow under the skin, "becoming maggots, bursting into living, squirming boils, emerging as full-blown, winged flies."

Unfortunately, the narrative is weak. The author has a staccato writing style that really gets in the way. In fact, that, and the book's casual racism, made it hard for me to keep reading. It didn't help that so many of the characters are impossible to respect. The alcoholic parents seem to revel in putting their children in harm's way. The mom in particular is hard to take. I kept wanting to slap her, and tell her to stop crying in her beer.

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Fuller wakes up the dogs in her sometimes politically incorrect, always honest memoir of growing up white in South Africa.

In 1972, England-born (1969) Alexandra "Bobo" Fuller moved to South Africa with her mother, father, and elder sister, Vanessa "Van." By that time three generations of her family had lived in various parts of Africa. Even so, the Fullers struggled to eke out an existence as tobacco farmers, probably in part due to their (p 306) "...knack for choosing bad-luck patches of land on which to farm..." They lived in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), as well as Malawi and Zambia, and survived, along with an obligatory group of servants (treated as second-class citizens by the Fuller family members young and old) and a varying assortment of dogs, on the proceeds of the harvest. Life was difficult, dangerous, and far from ordinary for Bobo and Van, being raised by an alcoholic, mentally erratic mother (p 210) "living with the ghosts of her dead children," and stoic, capable father, who kept the family afloat but provided little in the way of typical fatherly love and affection. Notable events and topics: a snake encounter, integration of the schools after Independence, the loss of the family's farm, several intra-continental moves, deaths in the family, the 1976 war, violence, and racism. The book's biggest strength is its forthright tone; flaws: its choppy all over the place nonchronological order, prevalent stringing together of word chains, and choice of cover photo (why not the one on the Reader's Guide?). All in all, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is a wonderful, genuine portrayal of one white farm family's life in South Africa. Also good: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls and The Twelve Little Cakes by Dominika Dery.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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