The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.80 (616 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0312590938 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-02-05 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"A Must Read" according to Jane Brazell. The importance of this work is summed up in Retief's final sentence: If no one is ever willing to break the protective silence of what goes on in individual lives, how will we ever learn from each other? (Retief, 270.)The story of growing up on a game. A memoir that makes you happy the genre exists I didn't know that I wanted to learn about South Africa until I started reading this book. The story is gripping and personal, but yet still largely universal with its exploration of friendship, family, finding one's true self, sexuality, and listenin. "A Captivating Story that Gets to One's Heart" according to Pablo Rafael. Glen Retief brings the reader into his childhood and early adult years with this memoir that is powerful, heartwarming, tragic and hopeful. It tells the story of a boy isolated from so many things in the world who, oftentimes unwillingly, faces the ha
An extraordinary, literary memoir from a gay white South African, coming of age at the end of apartheid in the late 1970s. When the prefects were caught torturing younger boys, they invented "the jack bank," where underclassmen could save beatings, earn interest on their deposits, and draw on them later to atone for their supposed infractions. Glen Retief's childhood was at once recognizably ordinary--and brutally unusual.Raised in the middle of a game preserve where his father worked, Retief's warm nuclear family was a preserve of its own, against ch
From Publishers Weekly Probing deeply into his personal memories of race, sexuality, and violence, creative writing instructor Retief has written a potent, evocative chronicle of his youth, coming-of-age at the end of apartheid in the 1980s. Recalling the "jack bank"— cricket bat strikes deposited in advance of future wrongs—Retief reflects: "Put immature adolescents in charge of younger boys' discipline, and the results will tend to be Abu Ghraib, the Milgram and Stanford experiments, Lord of the Flies." Yet when he became a prefect, he found "enormous, surprising pleasure" delivering jacks himself. Because of the jack bank, "Sexuality is so