Born a Crime

By Trevor Noah, 304 pages, Spiegel &Grau, 2016
Reviewed by Wendy Reif, June 13, 2020

I’m prejudiced. I love Trevor Noah, the South African comedian who replaced Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” So no surprise, I loved his book.

Noah has a sharp wit that is incisive, worldly and devoid of cheap jokes. His book, “Born a Crime,” is the story of growing up as a mixed-race child under apartheid and early post-apartheid, where his black mother and white, Swiss/German father committed one of the country’s worst crimes … creating him.

His mother, a central character in the book, is a resilient, church-obsessed parent whose tough love and humor clearly guided Trevor to a better place in life. Noah’s description of their relationship and his daily struggles to survive in a world where he was not supposed to be confirms my belief that the worst experiences make some of the best and funniest stories years later.

Combining his wit with storytelling acumen, Noah addresses racism in a compelling tale filled with memorable childhood exploits that will make your own life seem bland, safe and easy. Not many of us can claim our mother threw us out of a moving car to save our life or our family was so poor at some point that we had to eat worms for sustenance.

Every teacher who ever tries to explain discrimination should assign this book. For one thing, it explains racism from a South African’s perspective, which may be easier for whites in America to understand. But Noah understands America well enough to put South African racism into an American context. No Cliff’s Notes version is necessary. The guy is succinct.

“In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation.” Apartheid, he explains, was all three of those things happening at the same time.

Although Noah’s white father plays a minor role in his life, his genes made Noah a misfit in a black-and-white world. Noah’s language skills (he’s a polyglot) turned out to be the key that enabled him to move among different racial and tribal groups.

You wouldn’t wish the struggles of Noah’s childhood on anyone, yet it is obvious those experiences cultivated the street smarts, and the very personal, yet global perspective Noah brings to his political comedy. He knows what it is like to endure domestic violence, police brutality and living in a racially divided country under leadership few trust.

What impressed me most when seeing him live during a taping of his show in NYC was his flair for answering questions from the audience. His book, like his responses to random audience questions, shows how cultural understanding combined with an uncanny wit enables him to rebuke a notion in a way that makes his criticism non-offensive.

You will laugh loudly, cringe, and cry when you read this book. And I guarantee, you will never use an outhouse ever again without thinking of Trevor Noah.