Set against the collapse of Robert Mugabe’s brutal regime in Zimbabwe, Peter Godwin’s memoir When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is a searingly touching memoir about a son’s quest to understand the father he fiercely loves but doesn’t really know.
    Godwin is a permanent ex-pat journalist who only returns to Zimbabwe to visit his family. With each visit he witnesses how the country he loves has fallen further into desperate poverty, despair and utter lawlessness. His parents, who are British, or so he’s always been led to believe, refuse to leave because Zimbabwe has become their home. Meanwhile, their pensions become virtually worthless with the hyper-inflation in the country, his father is mugged, they are extorted by a former housekeeper who brings men with guns into their home, and as their health begins to fail, it’s almost impossible to access the medication they need. After his mother’s hip replacement surgery, she requires a blood transfusion but refuses to get one because the country’s AIDS crisis has made the blood supply very suspect. Godwin fully realizes the decline of his home country when he goes to visit his sister’s grave and sees that someone has shit right on it, people are planting food crops all over the cemetery and the bronze memorial plaque with his sister’s name on it has been stolen.
Godwin also describes covering the forced eviction of white farmers by Mugabe goons in a land distribution scheme that Godwin argues is more about distracting the population from his horribly inept leadership than equal land distribution. Some of the white farmers are brutally beaten and killed. In Zimbabwe the privileged white elite, like his parents, soon become a terrorized minority. However, it’s obvious in the memoir that aside from a small Mugabe supported elite, the entire population is severely suffering and many black Zimbabwean friends treat Godwin and his parents with great kindness and love. Amidst his increasingly disturbing description of his parent’s lives and the state of Zimbabwe, Godwin discovers that his supposedly British father is actually a Polish Jew whose family died in the Holocaust. He also discovers how much his father loves him when he finds a well-thumbed scrapbook of all the journalism he’s ever done. Godwin had always assumed his father disapproved of his life. Godwin has written a heartbreaking, beautiful memoir that lingers in your mind for days.
When She was White explores the tragic life of Sandra Laing. Raised in an Afrikaner home in apartheid South Africa, Laing suffers from rampant discrimination due to her dark skin and frizzy hair. At age 10, the government re-classifies her as “coloured” due to pressure from her school and community. Rumours circulate that her mother had an affair with a black man, a serious taboo in South Africa, but the family argues that her appearance must be some genetic throwback from previous generations. As a teenager, Laing rus away from home with her black boyfriend and moves to a black township, going from a life of relative comfort to serious poverty in the process. Over the years Laing is brutally beaten by her abusive husband, is forced to flee and loses some of her children to foster care. But eventually she reunites her family and creates a successful business in post-apartheid South Africa. She desperately tries to rekindle a relationship with her two white brothers, who want nothing to do with her and believe she is only trying to make money off their family’s pain.
Stone’s book is about more than just one sad story. It also delves into the ugly reality of the apartheid era in South Africa, where your race became your prison and healing and reconciliation are lengthy, drawn-out processes.