Innocents in Africa: An American Family's Story |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Africa History > Item 248
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Innocents in Africa: An American Family's Story
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by Drury Pifer
Sales Rank: 1726287
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$0.01
At Amazon
on 6-17-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 338 pages
Published by: HarcourtEdition: 1st Edition February 1994
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0151075646
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0151075645
Book Dimensions:
9 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
Weighs: 1.5 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
With wry humor and sharp observation, playwright Pifer elegantly mixes memory and research to reconstruct the world of his South African boyhood from 1933 to 1945. Pifer's father, an idealistic mining engineer in search of challenge and stability during the Depression, found it in Africa, but his earnest American egalitarianism soon put him in conflict with Afrikaner mine overseers, and his career under magnate Sir Ernest Oppenheimer stalled. The author deftly evokes his family--"my mother had the freedom of a disobedient daughter"--and the isolation of the desert town of Oranjemund. The book is even more resonant in its snapshots of mid-century Southern Africa: the still-simmering enmity between Afrikaners and the English; the ripples from Hitler's war in what prior to WW I had been the German territory of South West Africa (currently Namibia). Pifer's knowing account of the travails of servants--"the chasm that exists between white mistress and African maid"--still rings true today. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Refreshing his memory by drawing on diaries and letters, playwright Pifer gives an enchanting account of his youth in South Africa and Namibia during the 1930s and 1940s. Against the rough background of dangerous work, corporate greed, rough landscape, harsh climate, seething racism, British colonial attitudes, pompous Naziism, and Boer nationalist bitterness, he reconstructs the stressful yet tender existence of his family in diamond and gold mining camps. Tales reminiscent of our own Wild West or the present Amazon Basin are related with such grace and humor that this book could become as thrilling a TV or movie production as Elspeth Huxley's The Flame Trees of Thika or Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa . Good relaxation reading, this is sure to be a popular item.
- Louise Leonard, Univ. of Florida Libs., Gainesville
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Innocents in Africa: An American Family's Story
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Updated on 6-17-2008.
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