New From Audible: Born a Crime Audiobook by Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show”

“The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah has written a new memoir, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, available as an audiobook from Audible, and we are pleased to be able to share a clip. In the Mail & Guardian, Darryl Accone wrote:

Born on February 20 1984, Trevor fell foul of any number of apartheid-era laws: to start, his parents had broken the Immorality Act (the 1927 version of which is the apt epigraph to the book).

In the simple, powerful prose that characterises Noah’s writing here, he recounts: “The doctors took her up to the delivery room, cut open her belly, and reached in and pulled out a half-white, half-black child who violated any number of laws, statutes, and regulations – I was born a crime.”

He was also born with a confusion of nationality, ethnicity and identity: “My mother lied and said I was born in KaNgwane, the semi-sovereign homeland for Swazi people living in South Africa. So my birth certificate doesn’t say that I’m Xhosa, which technically I am. And it doesn’t say that I’m Swiss, which the government wouldn’t allow. It just says that I’m from another country.”

The past is another country, they say, and Noah takes the reader through the years from 1984, with brief servings of our history and its lurid laws and practices around race, work, sex and violence to contextualise his personal story for non-South African readers.

This is Trevor Noah’s story told through stories and vignettes that are sharply observed, deftly conveyed and consistently candid. Growing organically from them is an affecting investigation of identity, ethnicity, language, masculinity, nationality and, most of all, humanity – all issues that the election of Donald Trump in the United States shows are foremost in minds and hearts everywhere.

The best way to enjoy this fascinating story is to hear it in Noah’s own voice, and the Audible version lets you feel as though he is really telling you his story.