Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country - Hardcover

Slovo, Gillian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316799238 ISBN 13: 9780316799232

Publisher: Little Brown & Co, 1997

Synopsis

The daughter of South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo tells how, when Nelson Mandela came to power, she returned to her homeland to reclaim her father and find her mother's murderer, only to discover the shocking truth about her parents' lives. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

The author's parents, Ruth First and Joe Slovo, were South Africa's best-known white opponents of apartheid. First was assassinated in 1982; Slovo became housing minister in Nelson Mandela's multiracial government before dying of cancer. Reconstructing their lives--often in jail or in hiding--their daughter (born in 1952) writes with painful honesty of the war inside her between admiration for their convictions and desperate longing for the normalcy and security denied her as a child. There is no easy resolution here, but great love and sorrowful understanding.

From the Publisher:

A passionate witness to the colossal upheaval that has transformed her native South Africa, Gillian Slovo has written a memoir that is far more than the story of her own life. For she is the daughter of Joe Slovo and Ruth First, South Africa’s pioneering anti–apartheid white activists — a daughter who always came second to political commitment. While recalling the extraordinary events that surrounded her family’s persecution and exile, and reconstructing the truth of her parents’ relationship and her own turbulent childhood, Slovo has also created an astonishing portrait of a courageous and independent mother and an honorable and stoic father.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown & Co
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0316799238
• ISBN 13: 9780316799232
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 282
• Editor: Donald Roger