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Book List:
Basic Quakerism
Corporate Discernment

The Jack Bank

The Jack Bank

The Jack Bank

A Memoir Of A South African Childhood

BY GLEN RETIEF

Brief Description:
Glen Retief now attends Pennsdale Meeting, but grew up in the Kruger National park in apartheid era S Africa. The Jack Bank is a central idea to the book, a bullying prefect at his boarding school would beat other pupils with a bat-in advance of any misdeed, building up a "Jack bank". Glen eventually became a prefect himself, perpetuating a system he now sees as a metaphor of apartheid. However, perhaps with insight gained from being gay in a hostile land, he eventually breaks away to become a radical activist working for change there and eventually moving to America.

St martins 2011 288 PP. Cloth

$22.49 (in stock)

 

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Reviews (1)

White Privilege: A child faces his world. Review of The Jack Bank by Glen Retief by Peterson Toscano

Childhood can be such a murky, shadowy time when viewed from the lofty perch of adulthood. Nostalgia mixed with fragmented memory and family folklore make the job of reconstructing the past a potential hazard. When I first read a draft of Glen's book, I was struck by the power of his voice, particularly the honest, eyes-wide-open voice of his boyhood self that emerges early on in the memoir.

Glen Retief grew up in Apartheid South Africa, a privileged white boy who lived much of his childhood on one of the world's most famous animal game reserves--Kruger National Park. Literally surrounded by lions and leopards and hippos (including the one that blundered into the family garden,) Glen artfully recreates key moments in his childhood that reveal dangers far greater than animal predators in the bush....
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