Zimbabwe Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood Alexandra Fuller Alexandra Fuller's tale follows her unfettered upbringing on several farms in Southern and Central Africa as her white family rides out the shifting political climate of the 1970s and '80s. What at first can seem wild and exciting -- a mother who uses hypodermic needles to spike the Christmas pudding, a father who shares his smokes and drinks -- can get ugly, fast. While her father is off fighting against independence in Rhodesia's civil war, her mother leaves Fuller in charge of her younger sister while she sees to the farm. The result is the family's latest disaster -- its third dead child, this one lost to drowning. Fuller's mother expects her and her older sister, Vanessa, to be little adults, both resilient and self-sufficient. Among the upheaval of revolution, the demands of the climate, and the vagaries of farm life, Fuller's mother casts the longest shadow in this story -- shooting an errant cobra that's found its way into the house, inviting her daughter to split a bottle of whiskey, and bragging that she and her husband have fought to keep white rule. Unlike other African memoirists, Fuller faces her racist, colonial heritage head on, offering no apologies -- only a hard-won understanding of the continent's unhappy contradictions.