{When a crocodile eats the sun}

Began reading this book at the suggestion of a friend. It is a memoir of a family living in Zimbabwe and the oppression and chaos they endure to live in a country they love. Woven through are stories of the author's childhood, that of his parents, and sister. Tough subject matter beautifully illustrated in Godwin's first person account of his time in Africa.

From Amazon.com:
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. In this exquisitely written, deeply moving account of the death of a father played out against the backdrop of the collapse of the southern African nation of Zimbabwe, seasoned journalist Godwin has produced a memoir that effortlessly manages to be almost unbearably personal while simultaneously laying bare the cruel regime of longstanding president Robert Mugabe. In 1996 when his father suffers a heart attack, Godwin returns to Africa and sparks the central revelation of the book—the father is Jewish and has hidden it from Godwin and his siblings. As his father's health deteriorates, so does Zimbabwe. Mugabe, self-proclaimed president for life, institutes a series of ill-conceived land reforms that throw the white farmers off the land they've cultivated for generations and consequently throws the country's economy into free fall. There's sadness throughout—for the death of the father, for the suffering of everyone in Zimbabwe (black and white alike) and for the way that human beings invariably treat each other with casual disregard. Godwin's narrative flows seamlessly across the decades, creating a searing portrait of a family and a nation collectively coming to terms with death. This is a tour de force of personal journalism and not to be missed. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker Godwin, the author of a previous memoir about growing up during Zimbabwe’s war of independence, has written a sequel of sorts, tracing the collapse of his country in the course of the past decade (the violently destructive Robert Mugabe is the "crocodile" of the title) in tandem with the decline of his father. The memoir’s central drama comes from the dying father’s revelation that he is not British at all, as his son had always believed, but a Polish Jew, born Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb, whose mother and sister were killed in Treblinka. Occasionally, Godwin’s attempts to knit the various story lines together seem a bit pat—"A white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere . . . waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility"—but he ultimately delivers a powerful narrative of grief and desperation, both personal and national. Copyright © 2007