Kaffir Boy
The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa
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Kaffir Boy
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Narrated by:
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Mark Mathabane
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By:
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Mark Mathabane
About this listen
The classic story of life in apartheid South Africa.
Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa’s most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.
This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation, for Mark Mathabane did what no physically and psychologically battered “Kaffir” from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do - he escaped to tell about it.
Mark Mathabane was born and raised in the ghetto of Alexandra in South Africa. He is the author of Kaffir Boy, Kaffir Boy in America, Love in Black and White, African Women: Three Generations, Miriam’s Song, and The Proud Liberal. He lectures at schools and colleges nationwide on race relations, education, and our common humanity. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon.
©1986 Mark Mathabane (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 354
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 319
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Story5 out of 5 stars 317
Find Me Unafraid tells the uncommon love story between two uncommon people whose collaboration sparked a successful movement to transform the lives of vulnerable girls and the urban poor. With a foreword by Nicholas Kristof.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A difficult and rewarding listen
- By R. MCRACKAN on 08-23-18
By: Kennedy Odede, and others
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The Imam's Daughter
- My Desperate Flight to Freedom
- By: Hannah Shah
- Narrated by: Christine Rendel
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 59
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 49
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 50
Hannah Shah is an Imam's daughter. She lived the life of a devout Muslim in a family of Pakistani Muslims in England, but behind the front door, she was a caged butterfly. For many years, her father abused her in the cellar of their home. At 16, she discovered a plan to send her to Pakistan for an arranged marriage, and she gathered the courage to run away. Relentlessly hunted by her angry father and brothers, who were intent on executing an "honor" killing, she moved from house to house in perpetual fear to escape them.
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4 out of 5 stars
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only half of the story is in Audible!
- By ellen on 02-09-11
By: Hannah Shah
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Infidel
- By: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- Narrated by: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,665
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,766
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Story5 out of 5 stars 2,771
This New York Times best-seller is the astonishing life story of award-winning humanitarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A deeply respected advocate for free speech and women's rights, Hirsi Ali also lives under armed protection because of her outspoken criticism of the Islamic faith in which she was raised.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Tough, Candid Assessment
- By Paul Mullen on 02-18-08
By: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- By: Maya Angelou
- Narrated by: Maya Angelou
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 9,508
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 8,369
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 8,336
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age - and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. But years later, she learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Emotional & Powerful
- By Miss Toni on 06-30-13
By: Maya Angelou
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That’s That
- By: Colin Broderick
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 38
Colin Broderick was born in 1968 and spent his childhood in Tyrone County in Northern Ireland. It was the beginning of the period of heightened tension and violence known as the Troubles, and Colin’s Catholic family lived in the heart of rebel country. The community was filled with Provisional IRA members, whose lives depended on the silence and complicity of their neighbors. But even when Colin does ask his parents about these events, he never receives a clear explanation. Desperate to protect her children, Colin’s mother tries to prevent exposure to or knowledge of the harm that surrounds them.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Well Written and Very Personal Memoir
- By Lulu on 01-08-16
By: Colin Broderick
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Augustown
- By: Kei Miller
- Narrated by: Dona Croll
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 131
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 117
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Story5 out of 5 stars 118
Ma Taffy may be blind, but she sees everything. So when her great-nephew Kaia comes home from school in tears, what she senses sends a deep fear running through her. While they wait for his mama to come home from work, Ma Taffy recalls the story of the flying preacherman and a great thing that did not happen. A poor suburban sprawl in the Jamaican heartland, Augustown is a place where many things that should happen don't, and plenty of things that shouldn't happen do.
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5 out of 5 stars
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SUPERB
- By ** on 06-25-17
By: Kei Miller
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Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 569
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 492
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Story5 out of 5 stars 488
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
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The Darling
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Mary Beth Hurt
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 378
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 128
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Story4 out of 5 stars 133
The Darling is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he's immediately placed in prison.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Complex and compelling
- By Ellen H. Anderson on 02-05-05
By: Russell Banks
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After the Roundup
- Escape and Survival in Hitler’s France
- By: Joseph Weismann
- Narrated by: J. Clark Allison
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 39
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Story5 out of 5 stars 36
On the nights of July 16 and 17, 1942, French police rounded up 11-year-old Joseph Weismann, his family, and 13,000 other Jews. After being held for five days in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d'Hiver stadium, Joseph and his family were transported by cattle car to the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp and brutally separated. A thousand children were left behind to wait for a later train. The French guards told the children that they would soon be reunited with their parents, but Joseph and his new friend, Joe Kogan, chose to risk everything in a daring escape attempt.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A “must-listen” book
- By Jonathan R Scupin on 09-25-18
By: Joseph Weismann
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers
- Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
- By: Katherine Boo
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,288
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,969
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,970
In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away.
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4 out of 5 stars
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An Antidote for Shantaram
- By Dr. on 06-14-12
By: Katherine Boo
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The Vagrants
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Jackie Chung
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 72
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Story4 out of 5 stars 53
Yiyun Li is the winner of the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. The Vagrants, set in 1979 China, is the story of those affected by the execution of a 28-year-old counterrevolutionary. Though suffering, Li's characters nevertheless struggle to maintain hope amid cruel circumstance.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Lovely prose, good story, deadly narration
- By Athene on 05-10-13
By: Yiyun Li
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Slave
- By: Mende Nazar, Damien Lewis
- Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 183
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 154
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Story5 out of 5 stars 156
Mende Nazer tells the story of her kidnap, at age 12, from an idyllic life with her family in a village in Sudan, and being sold into slavery. Trafficked to Europe and the London home of a diplomat, Nazer escaped - only to find she had to fight for asylum.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Heartbreaking dose of reality
- By Sarah on 09-02-09
By: Mende Nazar, and others
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The Association of Small Bombs
- By: Karan Mahajan
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 576
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 516
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Story4 out of 5 stars 509
When brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana, two Delhi schoolboys, pick up their family's television at a repair shop with their friend, Mansoor Ahmed, one day in 1996, disaster strikes without warning. A bomb - one of the many "small" bombs that go off seemingly unheralded across the world - detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the Khurana boys, to the devastation of their parents. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A tragedy of manners
- By jdukuray on 07-22-16
By: Karan Mahajan
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Dreams in a Time of War
- A Childhood Memoir
- By: Ngugi wa'Thiong'o
- Narrated by: Hakeem Kae-Kazim
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 80
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 74
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 72
Of Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, Ngugi wa Thiongo was born in 1938 in the backlands of his country (Kiambu district) to a father whose four wives bore him two dozen or so children. Ngugi was the fifth child of the third wife. His father was a peasant farmer forced to become a squatter after the British Imperial Act of 1915. Before going off to school, he had what was then considered a bizarre and inexplicable thirst for learning....
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4 out of 5 stars
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An escape through education
- By Tango on 06-17-12
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A Fraction of the Whole
- By: Steve Toltz
- Narrated by: Colin McPhillamy, Craig Baldwin
- Length: 25 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 230
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 143
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 145
Stewing in an Australian prison, Jasper Dean reflects on his relationship with his dead father and recounts the many zany adventures they shared together.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Funny and Thought-provoking Tale of Human Nature
- By Asha Ember on 01-27-10
By: Steve Toltz
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Shalimar the Clown
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Aasif Mandvi
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 572
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 241
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Story4 out of 5 stars 238
When Maximilian Ophuls is murdered outside his daughter's home by his Kashmiri Muslim driver, it appears to be a political killing. Ophuls is the former U.S. ambassador to India and America's leading figure in counter-terrorism. But there is much more to Ophuls and his assassin, a mysterious man calling himself "Shalimar the Clown", than meets the eye. One woman is at the center of their shared history, a history of betrayal and deception.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Incredible
- By Barry on 12-07-05
By: Salman Rushdie
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Midnight's Children
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Lyndam Gregory
- Length: 24 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,004
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,592
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,577
Salman Rushdie holds the literary world in awe with a jaw-dropping catalog of critically acclaimed novels that have made him one of the world's most celebrated authors. Winner of the prestigious Booker of Bookers, Midnight's Children tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of India's independence.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Outstanding book, superb narration
- By MarcS on 06-09-09
By: Salman Rushdie
What listeners say about Kaffir Boy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Colin
- 01-08-21
Absolutely gripping
As a South African raised in Apartheid South Africa myself, this book was eye opening. I found myself rethinking my own perceptions growing up. It is a must read for every South African today
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Bee
- 02-04-22
Amazing History
A story of triumph over adversity. His story exposes how SA mirrors the U.S.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 02-17-24
incredible
Amazing story, truly inspiring. performed by the author with grace and emotion. Excellent listen. highly recommend
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Kindle Customer
- 05-13-16
A gripping true story
A real life story written so you can emotional feel the senseless and appalling apartheid policy in South Africa.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- ShivaLyle
- 04-12-18
A story every person should hear
This is an incredible story of a boy’s triumph over apartheid. It’s a real eye opener to the reality of life for a black person under apartheid law. It will definitely help any person to have compassion for all oppressed people and want to help their plight. If you are finding yourself at all ungrateful or complaining about your life, this book will change that very quickly. I am grateful Mark/Johannesburg put this story to words.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- DIY manAmazon Customer
- 04-26-19
great book!!
I really enjoyed this book. it was detailed filled but never got bogged down to make it boring. it is truly a great read and an inspiring story of faith , overcoming, and achieving one's goal. it will be a long time before I forget it.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Monique Thomas
- 07-26-20
A MUST READ!!
decided to look for a book that would give me a feel for Apartheid while watching the Black Lives Matter Riots here in the United States! The stories that the Aurhor shared about his life was so detailed that I felt I was right there with him. This book should be on the list of books for High School Students to read! I hated for the story to end. Thank you Mark Mathabane! May God's Grace and Peace be with you and your family always. Monique Cunningham-Thomas
Narration was Perfect
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Lynn R. Davis
- 03-10-18
Awesome!
Buy this book! The performance was very touching since it was the author sharing his own experiences.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 09-30-17
my new favorite book
this book deserves to be on the list of mandatory reads at every high school! excellent coming of age story. there needs to be a part two.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Makgale
- 08-13-16
Wonderful read.
All young South Africans regardless of race need to read this book to provide a context for the events and affairs of the country and people at large.
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4 people found this helpful