The Author (Trevor Noah)

The author is primarily known as a television commentator and comedian – specifically, as the host of the political satire program, “The Daily Show” on The Comedy Network in the United States and online. The book is a memoir of his origins in apartheid-era South Africa, a situation in which virtually everything about the society was defined not only by legal, governmental, and economic distinctions between races, but by negative, destructive attitudes of whites towards non-whites. The author’s mixed-race origins (that is: his mother was black, his father was white) made him, according to the apartheid system and as his title suggests, “born a crime,” in that intimate, reproductive relationships between whites and blacks were illegal. As such, and as he discusses at length in the book, he was an outcast from almost every community he attempted to enter, or felt as though he...