Born A Crime by Trevor Noah

You do not emerge from reading this thinking Trevor Noah grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth, and you do see where his exceptionally insightful interview style grew up.
The title comes from the fact that his Xhosa mother had conceived a child with a white Swiss-German, which was illegal at the time.  Mixed race South Africans could breed with each other, but whites and blacks were prohibited from doing so. It is not a coincidence that Noah's father is a European and not a South African.  Apartheid was on it's last gasps when he was born in 1984, but it was by no means over in the time he was growing up.
His mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, had the rebellious spirit that enabled her to face down a hostile and inhospitable world, and without her Noah would not have ended up where he is.  However, while you emerge from the book kind of stunned, she is not uncomplicated and flawed.
This book is an engaging, fast-paced and vivid read, traversing Noah’s early childhood, confined by the absurdities of apartheid, where he could not walk openly with either of his parents, where he was often closeted inside his grandmother’s two-roomed home, where he was mistaken for white, through to his troubled years at school, and to his budding success as a hustler selling pirated CDs and DJing at parties, he is very multi-dimensional.  The odds always seemed stacked against him, as they are for South Africa’s black citizens. Many are trapped by the legacies of colonialism, apartheid and post-apartheid profligacy and face poverty, hunger, violence, bullying, racism and limited opportunities.  It is a timely read.