First, I would like to thank Mr. Gordon and Goodreads for providing me with a Kindle copy of this book via a giveaway.

In this substantial memoir, Mr. Gordon reminisces about growing up and later raising his own family on a tobacco farm in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia). He was born to a Rhodesian-born white tobacco farmer and a British mother. His father’s mother was also British, and his father was born in India and later made Rhodesia his home, started the substantial tobacco farm and became a well-respected speaker and a person people went to for problem solving. Mr. Gordon’s slightly eccentric father, who took over the farm, instilled in his family an appreciation for the beauty of their country. His descriptions of the flora and fauna, the rivers and mountains, the wild animals – hippos, elephants, different species of snakes, wild pigs, etc. – are beautiful, and Mr. Gordon painted a beautiful picture of the physical aspect of his home country, but not such a beautiful picture of the decade and a half Rhodesian Bush War he and his family lived through and the politics that ultimately forced him and many of his white neighbors to emigrate to other countries.

That said, Mr. Gordon wrote this memoir in the present tense, which, in my opinion, did not work well especially at the beginning when he was recalling his early childhood memories – and the tense changed from time to time, from one sentence to the next. To be frank, I nearly put the book aside, and might have done so had I not felt an obligation to persist because I had won it. Sometimes the narration was childlike, as if Mr. Gordon was trying to remember what he would have thought or said when he was five or eight or eleven in that voice {not effective, in my view) but then the next sentence he sounded like an adult. It did not have an effect of immediacy on me, as one would assume the use of present tense was meant to convey; it seemed artificial. Obviously his childhood was in the past; that was the tense it needed.

Once past the childhood years, though, the present tense was not as disagreeable to me, although even after there were some odd tense changes in paragraphs. At times, as well, there would just be a random memory, a paragraph or sentence, unrelated to the paragraphs or sentences before or after it and it would trip me up trying to figure out what connection I missed. Example: “While an Afrikaans family on the other side of the Dyke is holidaying, their cook is killed by the family dogs when feeding them. The dogs have puppies which sell for top dollar.” Why would those puppies sell for top dollar? No explanation. Sometimes there are references based on faulty assumptions about the readers, e.g.: “One of RBC’s TV presenters, Geoffrey Atkins I think, who hosts a show called Talk About, is injured in a bomb blast in a Paris shop. The irony is not lost on us or on the media.” Well, it’s lost on me. He did not explain what was ironic about that blast or injury. One other odd quirk: he referred to a number of women only buy their first initial, including his wife and three daughters – yet he identified his wife and daughters by their names in his acknowledgments and on the copyright page. I could understand why maybe a former girlfriend would be identified that way, but not his immediate family. It irked me. These were a few of the moments in the book that hampered the flow. Otherwise, the rating would have been higher. ( )