Writing a memoir can be like entering a war zone: sometimes hand-to-hand combat, sometimes a navigation of minefields, or guerrilla tactics, or killing on remote. Peter Godwin reports from deep within those recesses. He’s battle-scarred as a soldier and as a journalist. He’s been embedded in a family history of secrets and half-truths he has declined to leave undisturbed. As a post-colonial son of what was once Rhodesia, he has burrowed his way back into experiences it might have been easier to forget.
That his father took the opposite tack and obscured his past was a discovery Godwin detailed in his 2006 memoir, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa. Behind George Godwin’s upper-crust Britishness lay the reality that, born Jewish in Poland, he was sent to boarding school in England in 1939 and lost his family to the Holocaust. In Exit Wounds, Godwin’s fourth memoir, his mother, who refused to leave a continually ravaged Zimbabwe until she was nearly 80, gets her turn.
