Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid
New York: Harper & Row, c1986. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. 24 cm, 418 pages, illus., Name written on front flyleaf, edges soiled. William Finnegan (born 1952) is a staff writer at The New Yorker and well-known author of works of international journalism. He has specially addressed issues of racism and conflict in Southern Africa and politics in Mexico and South America, as well as poverty among youth in the United States, and is well known for his writing on surfing. In 1986, he was sent to Johannesburg, where he followed black reporters who gathered information for white reporters during Apartheid. This led to the 1988 publication of Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters. A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique, published in 1992, grew out of a series of correspondences about the war-torn nation for the magazine, and Finnegan's own travels throughout that war-torn nation. Named by The New York Times Book Review as a top ten nonfiction book of 1986, this seminal piece of cross-cultural journalism is an account of a white American's experience teaching black students in South Africa—an account essential for its incisive coverage of the student anti-apartheid movement, as well as for the unpretentious charms of its prose. An illuminating, engaging account of the year (1980) the 27-year-old American author spent teaching at a ""coloured"" high school near Cape Town. Once in South Africa he is brought up quickly by what he calls the ""morbid novelties of apartheid,"" and his descriptions bring day-to-day life in South Africa alive as few other contemporary works of reportage on the country have done. At Grassy Park High School, Finnegan tries to break away from the repressive syllabus and promotes career and school counseling. But he learns that he has underestimated the poison of the system. Indeed, only half of any class may graduate to the next class. During the year, there is a two-month student boycott, allowing Finnegan to see many students' and teachers' true political beliefs, which are often at odds with his own liberal, colorblind, cheerful, damn-the-system approach. Finnegan seems to become worn down, to the point of harshly questioning himself. The book is remarkable for its sense of place, descriptions of the countryside, and most of all for making vivid the people who live in South Africa--casually racist Boers; uncomfortably racist Englishmen; ""coloureds,"" whom the whites wish to co-opt. A vivid, stunning, saddening eyewitness report. Condition: good / good.
Keywords: Apartheid, Race Relations, Black Studies, South Africa, Guerrillas, Afrikaners, Racism, Resistance, Bantu, Segregation, Discrimination, Education, Cross-Cultural, Journalism
ISBN: 0060155701
[Book #16569]
Price: $35.00