When a Crocodile Eats the Sun | 
 enlarge | Author: Peter Godwin
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: £16.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 147807
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0330433695
EAN: 9780330433693
ASIN: 0330433695
Publication Date: March 2, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: neat and clean book, quick despatch ,ex lib copy,
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 Intensely moving - a jolly good read! December 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Upon finishing this magnificent piece of work, my mind was curiously turned to another book by an African writer which I also read this year and which has the word "sun" in its title. I remembered the haunting novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie "Half of a Yellow Sun". While the latter is a fictionalised account of events taking place in her native Nigeria well before she was old enough to know about them (the Biafra war), "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun" is a harrowing personal journey through Zimbabwe, a country sliding, nay, hurtling down an abyss of a dictator's own making. Both books have the same powerful message: glittering hope can so easily be extinguished and replaced by utter despair.
Godwin, who has made a life for himself and his family in New York, observes the increasingly harrowing death of a much beloved country through the eyes of his loving parents and friends. Each time he returns to Zimbabwe is more painful than the last. He watches the implosion of his country while coming to terms with an irretrievably altered New York after 9/11. Through Godwin's vivid imagery, the beauty of Zimbabwe leaps off the page at you and yet you hold yourself back from wanting to go there. You know it will be too painful to see.
You watch the author's heart slowly break as his parents drift from prosperity and security to penury and hopelessness as they become old and frail. Your heart bleeds for him as he has to witness the agonies of his parents as his mother struggles to cope with heavy surgery and his father's legs literally rot beneath him. All the while he is having to come to terms with newly discovered certainties about who and what he really is.
As if their daily battles with insecurity and hyperinflation are not bad enough, you suffer with Godwin as his elderly parents are regularly fleeced by their own staff; people whom they have literally raised through life.
Godwin will probably never write a more personal account than this. I cannot see how that would be possible for any human being.
I loved this book and it is after a great deal of thought that I have denied Godwin his full compliment of five stars. Irrespective of who his ultimate audience is, there is never an excuse for generalising about a continent as large and varied as Africa. Why repeatedly write about "returning to Africa" or "spending another night in Africa" when you really are talking about Zimbabwe?
Godwin never writes about his plane landing in "Europe" when it touches down in London or even "the United States of America" when speaking about his home in New York. For a person who calls himself a white Zimbabwean, this is unforgivable behaviour. This is what causes suspicion about white immigrants in the minds of indigenous Africans. To paraphrase, it is the reason that the white man lives in "Africa" with his bags packed. He sees a continent of more than fifty countries in ridiculous and offensive monochrome. If a highly educated person born and raised in Zimbabwe can wilfully do this, why should Sarah Palin be vilified for not knowing that Africa is a continent?
Is Zimbabwe exactly the same as its neighbour Botswana? Is being in Zimbabwe exactly the same as being in Mali? I am sure the answer a seasoned global journalist like Godwin would give to both of these questions is "certainly not". Why spoil your masterpiece in such a lazy and irresponsible manner then, Mr Godwin? Contrast this with "Half of a Yellow Sun". Ngozi Adichie does not resort to this ridiculous shorthand: she writes about Biafra specifically because that is the country her book is about.
Notwithstanding this, I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone who would like to know more about the mess Robert Mugabe has made of a country he once professed himself to love.
Better still, read "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun" because of that best and most old fashioned of reasons: it is a jolly good read!
Heart-breaking and deeply moving August 7, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Peter Godwin was born in Rhodesia, and in 1996 he published 'Makiwa', a gripping account of how he grew up in that country. He was conscripted into the Rhodesian army to fight against the independence movement, by which time he felt that he was fighting in an unjust cause. He eventually got to England, became a journalist, and in 1981, now based in the United States, he returned to what in 1980 had become independent Zimbabwe, partly because his parents were still living there and partly because he loved the country and its people. But he now had to record that the new government of Robert Mugabe was more savage than the white government had been and was carrying out bloody suppression in Matabeleland - a sign of things to come. Godwin's reporting at that time made him persona non grata and he had to leave Zimbabwe again, though he was able to return after Mugabe had `stabilized' the country with the so-called Unity Accord in 1987.
This second volume, first published in 2006, is an account of several later visits, beginning with one in 1996. In the chapters relating to 1996, 1997 and 1998, Mugabe's dictatorship is not central to his account, though of course he is aware of it; but he is more concerned with the quite non-political aspects of his family's life. At this time Mugabe had not yet whipped up anti-white agitation. Indeed he had for years encouraged white people to stay and help the Zimbabwean economy. In fact, in the year 2000, "78% of white farmers were on property they had purchased after independence, only when that land had first been offered to -and turned down by - the government, as was required by law" (p.56).
Godwin's next visit was in 2000. That year Mugabe wanted to change the constitution to allow him another 12 years in power; and this change had to be ratified by a referendum. To get the new constitution accepted, he inserted in it a law allowing the seizure of white-owned farm land for redistribution to black peasants (though in fact most of it went to his cronies). His instrument for this were the so-called war veterans, and violence against whites now took off, under such thugs as those calling themselves `Hitler' Hunzvi and `Stalin Mau Mau'. When Mugabe lost the referendum, he unleashed violence also against Tsvangirai's newly created Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
In 2001 there was a total eclipse of the sun over Zimbabwe, and, unusually, there was another one in 2002. The folklore expression for this is that `a crocodile eats the sun', and it is considered the worst of omens. Godwin now chronicles in the most graphic manner the increasing horror of Mugabe's appalling regime and the descent of Zimbabwe into chaos and lawlessness: the ruin of agriculture; the displacement of millions of black farm workers; famine; the government's deliberate withholding of food supplies from areas where the opposition is strong; hyper-inflation; casual murders and robberies, with the police either unwilling to intervene or actually participating in them. Among the many grotesque vignettes: cemeteries plundered, patches of maize planted between the graves, and befouled with excrement; the RSPCA being given permission to evacuate tortured animals from farms - when their white owners are not allowed to leave their besieged homes. Godwin is there during the General Strike of 2003 and its brutal suppression.
But this is not only a journalist's book about Zimbabwe. It is also a touching story of a loving family. The scenes with his gallant and now impoverished, sick and aged parents - who, beleaguered as they are, refuse to leave Zimbabwe - are deeply moving. And there is an unexpected dimension. On a visit in 2001, when he is in his forties, Peter Godwin learns that his father, George, now 77, was not in fact the reserved Anglo-African he had always taken him to be, but was born a Polish Jew. Only now can George bring himself to talk and write about it. The revelation has an immense impact on his son, who inserts a couple of chapters to tell the story of George's Warsaw childhood, how, just before the war, he came to leave Poland as a teenager, without his family. George's mother and sister later perished in Treblinka. Peter Godwin had heard of Auschwitz and Belsen, but (somewhat surprisingly for a journalist) he had never heard of the other extermination camps, which he now researched and whose horrors he then describes.
This beautifully written book is a lament for Zimbabwe, but it is also a tribute to his parents, and it is dedicated to his father's memory.
Well worth reading July 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I received this book last week and haven't put it down until I finished it yesterday morning. The last few chapters had me in a flood of tears...not only because of the death in the author's family but because of the sadness of the whole Zimbabwe situation and the effect it has had on millions of people's lives. Well worth reading.
Better Understand Africa with this Sensitive Masterpiece June 29, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is the second of Peter Godwin's two books on his family's experience of Rhodesia-into-Zimbabwe. You would do well to read them in the reverse order; the Crocodile followed by Mukiwa. Mukiwa on its own or read first is but an interesting account of Godwin's earlier life in the white-haven of Rhodesia and of his growing awareness that change was inevitable and deserved. There are many such accounts. However if read as an epilogue, Mukiwa, confirms the right of Godwin to be the author of Crocodile and explains his perceptive insight. Crocodile is a must, a disturbing must-read. Identity, you will learn, applies not just to the person but to a nation, in this case to the African nation. I have bought and given away three copies and have now to buy a third because none is being returned.
A Special Personal Story about Zimbabwe June 28, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
What a wonderful, unable-to-put-down book about the author's personal family life in Zimbabwe. I read his previous book "Mukiwa", White Boy in Africa, and loved that too. His story this time is gripping . . . about his family life, a surprise discovery, the craziness of life in Mugabe's Zimbabwe. It is thought-provoking and a quite incredible adventure story too.
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