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Interesting Personal Account

Customer Rating:
In Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller describes her childhood in Africa. Fuller's story, told in graceful prose, is brutal and touching and never overly sentimental. I enjoyed many of the stories Fuller includes in this memoir, but I found certain aspects tedious. Fuller's family moves through many different living situations in numerous countries and confronts various unstable political regimes. After awhile, these places and politics run together and became repetitive. The tedium borne of this repetition somewhat lessens the overall power of this memoir, but Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight remains a worthwhile read.

Interesting read!

Customer Rating:
I certainly enjoyed this book. We will be reading this book as a choice for a book club. There is a lot to discuss-from the family life to the unrest that is pertinent to what was once Rhodesia and is now suddenly thrust into the spotlight as Zimbabwe. Ms. Fuller takes you to a place that few in today's world will experience. She is honest in her depiction of her family and one is caught up in each of their personalities. I wish more books could offer such insight and descriptions that will both educate and entertain at the same time.

Gail Boyd, Washington, Ga.

Incredibly sad

Customer Rating:
Although mostly well-written, this memoir is very depressing. I was expecting more about Africa from this NF book, but it's largely the tale of a highly dysfunctional family that suffers blow after blow, bringing much of it on itself. And no one seems to learn anything from their mistakes. The Book of Job is uplifting reading by comparison.

A surprisingly great read!

Customer Rating:
I found this in audio at an audio rental store. The front intrigued me so I read the back and decided to give it a go. I liked it so much that my husband decided he wanted to listen to it too! What an interesting life to have lead at such a young age!

The Roads of Rhodesia

Customer Rating:
This family is composed mainly of fighters, people who decided to forsake the clotted cream comfort of their native England for the thorny bush country of, what was then known as, Rhodesia.

In poetic prose that the reader occasionally stumbles over, Fuller takes us on a dense tour of her life in Africa, thesaurus in hand, and describes the stunning beauty and hopeless squalor of the land with a series of adjectives and adverbs that occasionally seem shoehorned in but rarely off-the-mark. This makes for an occasionally jarring, though still beautiful, journey, much like what the young author must have experienced perched on the spare tire of her family's bucking Land Rover. Some of Fuller's descriptive metaphors, however, are quite luminous; they stay with you.

Still, she hits home with her prose more often than not, and produces a thoroughly readable if somewhat detached report on the life of her family, and how they bear up as trauma eclipses joy after a series of dismal events, including the deaths of small children and runs for the border of several African nations as things (i.e., the political landscape, war) shift and change. These things would loom large in anyone's life, and they are told here with an air of inevitability and acceptance . . . even excitement.

Here's a family who thrives on adventure.

There were several times Fuller had me right there in the back of the Land Rover with her. I was unsettled and awed by what we saw together. She's an amazing writer when she gets going.

Great read.