Peter Godwin's Memoir of Life in Zimbabwe WHEN a CROCODILE EATS the SUN

Peter Godwin (b. S. Rhodesia 1957) is a journalist, war correspondent, contributor to the NYT & VANITY FAIR has written his memoir that spans the turbulent and violent years in  Zimbabwe under the bloody & corrupt rule of Robert Mugabe.  Godwin's family are among the minority population of white European colonists that settled in Rhodesia after WWII.  Having studied in England & having lived abroad his accounts are told through the lens of a journalist filtered with feelings for his family, home and white minority demographics.  Godwin puts his reporting into perspective "I only describe, criticize, review - I am not really a doer."  He also registers how his "little tribe of white Africans are being viewed by foreigners. "I  realize it is pity…I feel embarrassed, humiliated mortified.  I am not used to being the one pitied. I am the one who pities others."  When the civil war against white rule broke out he served in the security forces. "I was fighting on the wrong side of a losing war."  Peace was declared in 1979 and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.  Dreams of a multi-racial, harmonious nation were demolished under 3 decades of escalating violent racial conflicts and Mugabe's oppressive, bloody rule.  Around the millenial years, white farm owners were killed; their lands appropriated.  (In 2003, J.M. Coetze won the Nobel Prize in Lit. for Disgrace about the horrific uprisings.)  Agricultural growth suffered as did the population from food shortages, rising unemployment; rampant AIDS epidemic and disease.  Still, Godwin's incisive & haunting memoir is a tour de force of account of personal & historic events written with elegance a & familial bond that makes the devastating events digestible.  In 2000, there were 2 solar eclipses.  African tribal legend has it that an eclipse of the sun occurs when a crocodile eats it.  It is the most alarming omen of furor resulting from mankind's behaviors.