#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime story of one man’s coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followedNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Michiko Kakutani, New York Times • Newsday • Esquire • NPR • Booklist Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle. Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he…
I told David recently that sometimes my idea of a heaven–a true heaven, entirely imagined but wholly a real place where we go when we die and live forever and ever, amen–would be the chance to relive our lives, exactly how they were, just without all the mistakes: none of the yelling. None of the gossiping. No fights, no personal cold wars, no shunned friends or hurt family members or crying children. It would be a chance to live our lives exactly how they’re supposed to be lived, in Ideal Land, where the children know they’re loved and you’ve never hurt anyone and you never go to bed at the end of the day cringing over that thing you said or that moment you let slip away. It would be a place where you made sure your neighbor knew you cared, and where you ensured the hungry were fed, and where you never turned away from someone trying to meet your eyes. It’d be a place where, if hurt or offended or upset, we’d get to react or move forward or jump past the pain in…