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Title: A Big Disappointment
Review: After having read Kaffir Boy, Mark Mathabane's eye-opening account of township life under apartheid, I was looking forward to his insights into US race relations (as the dust jacket promises). Unfortunately, this book contains virtually none. It is a big bore, so full of self-congratulation for having beat the odds, for being so open minded, for being so well-read, for being such a wonderful writer, etc. that by page fifty my interest was replaced by irritation. The relentlessly stilted nature of his prose does not help (he crams in so many SAT-words, it's as though he were trying to fulfil a quota). Finally, he seems to think the Acknowledgements section too confining, so he peppers his mundane descriptions of moving from this city to that with mentions of every nice person he ever met in the past ten years. Thumbs down.
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