Recommendations
Books Like Born a Crime
Best books to read after Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
Born a Crime is the memoir of growing up mixed-race in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa — a story about race, language, survival, and one of the most remarkable mother-son relationships in contemporary memoir literature. These 8 books extend into South African history, apartheid literature, comedy memoir, and the literature of racial identity.
- 1Buy
Long Walk to Freedom
by Nelson Mandela
Mandela's autobiography — the defining first-person account of the apartheid struggle and its aftermath — providing the historical and political context for the South Africa Noah grew up in, written by the man whose release from prison in 1990 Noah describes as a transformative childhood event.
- 2Buy
Educated
by Tara Westover
Westover's memoir of escaping an isolated, survivalist childhood to become a Cambridge PhD — the closest parallel to Born a Crime in combining an extraordinary, dysfunctional family story with a narrator who escapes through intelligence, education, and the accident of an exceptional mother.
- 3Buy
Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates's letter to his son about being Black in America — examining race, fear, and the destruction of Black bodies through the American history that is the parallel to the South African apartheid history Born a Crime inhabits.
- 4Buy
The Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls
Walls's memoir of a chaotic, impoverished childhood with a brilliant, reckless father and a self-absorbed mother — the memoir that most directly parallels Born a Crime in combining a loving but unflinching portrait of deeply flawed parents with the narrator's eventual escape.
- 5Buy
Yes Please
by Amy Poehler
Amy Poehler's comic memoir — one of the best examples of a comedian using their particular perspective to examine their own life with humor, warmth, and real insight — the closest tonal companion to Born a Crime in the comedy memoir space.
- 6Buy
Kaffir Boy
by Mark Mathabane
South African author Mark Mathabane's memoir of growing up Black in apartheid South Africa in the 1960s and 70s — written a generation before Born a Crime, it provides the South African context that Noah's book references and shows the full horror of the system his mother navigated.
- 7Buy
I Am Malala
by Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai's memoir of surviving the Taliban's assassination attempt and advocating for girls' education in Pakistan — another memoir about a remarkable young person navigating an extraordinarily dangerous social order, shaped by an exceptional parent.
- 8Buy
The Color of Water
by James McBride
McBride's account of his white Jewish mother who raised twelve Black children in America — another memoir about the complexity of racial identity in the context of a singular, unconventional mother, which directly parallels the mother-son relationship at the center of Born a Crime.
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