Book Review: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
An African Childhood
by Alexandra Fuller
315 Pages
Childhood Memoir Zimbabwe
Random House
Published 2001
In a land not her own, but not really being connected to anywhere else is how little Alexandra Fuller grew up. Living in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), enduring the war and racial turmoil, Alexandra (aka Bobo) grew up almost raising her parents as she raised herself. Her mother was mentally unstable after loosing several of her children in childbirth or shortly after, and very maniacal in her pleasures and hatreds. Her father worked most of the time, and when not working he joined up with the white side of the government in the Rhodesian Civil War. They allowed (I could even go so far as to say encouraged) their daughters at a very young age to drink alcohol and smoke. The only rule was that they didn't get caught smoking at boarding school or they would be kicked out.
This is a book of what it would be like to grow up in a country where you don't fit, where you parents express racism outwardly, where you have to live in a gated home and go away to boarding school from very early on. Also a place where schools are segregated into A Schools, B Schools and so on depending on your race and skin tone. What shocked me the most was the racism of her parents, but more than that was how Bobo somehow managed to not embrace it herself. There are several key moments in the book where you realise that she is going to end up just fine, that almost in spite of her parents ideology and beliefs, she will be different than them.
I loved reading Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (actually listened to it). Alexandra Fuller skillfully tells her story, and when she does, even the horrors of it all seem to have a tinge of hope. I don't like downer and gloomy books, and this is not one of those, but she isn't cheery for no purpose, I would say just optimistic. I loved Bobo as a young girl, and the older she got the more I felt like I knew her. She is an excellent writer, storyteller and lived an extreme life, I am so glad that she told her story, I am a better person for having met her, if only through her book.I don't even love memoirs and I loved this read! So if you are a non-fiction buff or love memoirs you would probably enjoy it all the more!
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight gets my special best books prize, the "Stellar Five Chicken Award" because chickens are so much better than stars, it really is just that good!
Author Website: Alexandra Fuller
If you enjoyed Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight you should check out The Glass Castle
How have you changed your story? Would you say when you are in the midst of tough situations you are optimistic or pessimistic?
Book Review: Beasts of No Nation
Author Photo by Seth Wening
Title: Beasts of No Nation
Author: Uzodinma Iweala
Pages: 176
Yearly Count: 70
Awards:
- The Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
- Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
- First-Place Winner of the 2005 2005 Discover Award, Fiction
- The Best Book of the Year by Time, People and Slate Entertainment Weekly New York Magazine
A boy soldier, Agu, a child of a nondescript age (between 9 and 12) and from an unnamed West African Nation, speaks forth of the reality of child soldiers everywhere. Written as a novel, Iweala has taken bits and pieces of child solders worldwide, and formed a conglomerate child soldier in his character Agu. Beasts of No Nation is filled with their inner thoughts, their heartbreaks, and what they are asked to do. Agu's own morals, ethics and survival take a backseat to the desires of his leaders, who all in all are only different degrees of jaded and violent in this war of confusion.
I read this during the read-a-thon, and I was impressed with the writing, the detail and the thoughts it stirred, but it was really hard to read about. I have become even more impressed with this novel after I read it and it settled in and I realized that the author wrote it when he was 23 years old. Inner war of the conscience plays a large part in Beasts of No Nation, of what Agu was taught, and what he is now forced to live. He was brought up going to church, reading the Bible, and now he feels nothing could be further from the beast he has become. This approach of conscience that Iweala used brought me inside Agu, to the thoughts and debates going on inside this child soldier, and really helped me feel a connection to him. Despite his outward actions of war and savage acts forced upon him, inside the war was just as strong, a battle of will, conscience and ultimately survival.
Commandant is shouting, but I am hearing him like he is speaking through one big bag of cotton. He is saying, let us pray, let us pray and then he is asking the Lord to be guiding us in everything we are about to be doing. I am thinking that we should not even be asking God for anything because it is like he is forgetting us. I am trying to forget Him anyway even if my mother would not be happying with me. She is always saying to fear God and to always be going to church on Sunday, but now I am not even knowing what day is Sunday (p. 44).
Author information I found interesting:
Stop Trying to 'Save' Africa article in the Washington Post by Uzodinma Iweala
Uzodinma Iweala Article in The Morning News
Galley Girl Catches up With Uzodinma Iweala Article in Time
I Don't Ever Want to Sit Back, Michelle Pauli, of Guardian interviews Uzodinma Iweala
