Born a Crime by Trevor NoahBook Review

Hi everyone today I'm here to talk about "Born a Crime" which is a memoir by Trevor Noah. You might have heard of Trevor Noah from his late-night talk show and as a stand-up comedian. I personally didn't know very much about him going into this book which is fine, I think, because A.) You learn a lot about him in the book and B.) Nothing that he talks about is contingent on you knowing things about him. In fact i really enjoyed learning about him and kind of meeting him and understanding his point of view and where he came from through listening to this book, which i will say, i listened to the audiobook and i would highly recommend it.

I'll talk about the narration and everything I liked about the book after a brief synopsis. So Trevor Noah is, like I said, a late-night talk show host and comedian. He was born in south africa in the years of the apartheid, and he was born from a black mom and a white dad, which at the time of his birth was literally a crime. People between races were not allowed to have relationships, and so he was born a mixed-race child in apartheid South Africa, which was a crime.

So he was a very unusual child in the sense that he was one-of-a-kind pretty much everywhere he went. It was not something that people saw a lot, so he stood out, and he talks about that how it affected him growing up, kind of being set apart from everyone, and how that made him sometimes popular and sometimes very unpopular. In the book he talks about stories from his childhood and jumps around a lot. He talks about his mother and their relationship, which is really close, and them going to church together, and about his father and his future stepfather and those kind of male relationships.

He talks about the friends he makes, about how he tries to fit in at school; it covers a wide range of topics and a lot of experiences of his life. So talking about the narration-- I listened to the audiobook and i can't recommend it enough. He is one of the most effortless and casual narrators. I love when celebrities or any memoir writer read their own book because obviously it's their story, having them tell it themselves just adds another layer of sort of intimacy.

But also no one can really read the story like they've written it themselves, so it's nice to listen to him read it to you. It really felt like just sitting down and someone telling you their life. But on top of that, not only do you get his life experiences and these events he's relying to you, but he also weaves in a lot of history and kind of cultural and political information about South Africa before and after the apartheid, which I found fascinating. Because i really don't know much about that time period.

Obviously most people know about it and have heard of it and nelson mandela and all these big kind of broader themes and looking at it from sort of the lens of history. But I found it really interesting to hear about these things through the lens of a person living in it, especially a person from such a unique perspective. Since he is a comedian i also found it to be very funny. I was laughing from like the first chapter on.

Even in the darkest moments of the story when he's talking about really difficult things, issues of racism or struggling with the relationship with his stepfather who was very abusive, all of these things-- in the funny moments and in the dark moments-- he is able to find humor and relay that in a very natural way. I think sometimes humor can come across very forced; when people are trying to be funny, and especially writing... So maybe listening to that elevated it. But hearing him, not tell jokes per se, but just deliver these stories in a humorous way at times, it was really enjoyable.

I was laughing out loud while listening to this in my car. And I was also like very moved by some of the more heartbreaking and scarier moments of the stories. When he's talking about being put in jail, being racially profiled things like that was really interesting to learn about and really difficult. There are some moments where it's talking about, especially his mother, and things that she tries to do as a black woman in South Africa at the time, and she's just prohibited from doing simply because of her race and gender that are like so infuriating.

And to see them through the lens of the mother's child and through a real person was so much more enlightening than just reading about it like in a newspaper or online. You hear these headlines and you see these things happening all over the world, but to be able to hear them told from someone who's lived through it, witnessed it and experience it was like such a different level of experience than just hearing about it, if that makes sense. So I got a lot more out of this book that i was expecting to. It was funny; it was heartbreaking; again his narration was just fantastic.

The only thing i didn't really love about it is that it jumped around a lot, like i said. So in one chapter he'd be in elementary school and the next he'd be a teenager. It just didn't feel thematically like there was any sort of flow, and that's fine. I mean it is called I think "stories from a South African childhood" so it's just different stories from his life.

Sometimes it was hard to jump from one time period to the other, and one chapter is talking about how he didn't have any friends and then the next chapter is talking about his best friend. So it was just kind of like confusing, but I get that they took place in different time periods. And I understand why he saved the very last chapter of this book for the end, which is really an amazing chapter. I thought that he started and ended the book on amazing notes; it got me hooked from the very beginning and it ended perfectly, and a lot of amazing moments in between with a few that were kind of like jarring, when he was talking about things that I was not expecting based on the chapter before it.

So that's my only criticism. I really like this book and again i can't recommend the audiobook enough. If you're interested in this at all I would say go the audiobook route, but if you don't like audiobooks for some reason, obviously I'm sure it'd be a great experience to read too. I just think it's a great story.

It's one of those celebrity memoirs that I feel like really holds up to more than just spilling secrets or writing about their life because they're famous. I feel like he actually has something to say with his life experiences, and more on top of that with how he talks about race and politics. So there's a lot going on in this but it never feels long. It was like eight and a half hours, which is kind of long for a celebrity memoir.

I feel like they're usually shorter than regular audio books. But eight and a half hours is a really good length for this. I would have listened to a few more hours. I thought he was really interesting and easy to listen to, like i said, and i love this book.

So if you have not read this book i can highly recommend it. If you have, let me know what you thought about it in the comments below. And i hope you guys enjoyed this video and learned something new, and I will see you in the next one. Bye!.