The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe [Kindle Edition]

Douglas Rogers (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Born in Zimbabwe, New York-based travel writer Rogers moves between two worlds with wit and grace while telling the dire-straits story of his childhood in Zimbabwe and his recent return. Zimbabwe's extremes of beauty and corruption will lure readers into the everyday struggle to preserve property and life against punishing weather, astronomical inflation, and the threat of other people. Angst, humor, beauty and terror mingle freely in his narrative: returning home he finds the family's backpacker lodge has become a brothel, and estates of "irises and tulips and acres of pruned white roses" have disappeared. He marvels at the "untamed roots of blazing flamboyant trees... buckling the city's pavement," the metamorphosis of the hardscrabble poor into diamond dealers, and his own parents: "instead of being crushed by this struggle, beaten down, they had been buoyed by it." This rousing memoir should win over anyone with a taste for exotic can't-go-home-again stories.

Review

"This vibrant, tragic and surprsingly funny book is the best account yet of ordinary life—for blacks and whites—under Mugabe’s dictatorship."
—The New York Times Book Review

"A nuanced, funny, and heartbreaking story."
—The New Yorker

"A gorgeous, open-hearted book.  Rogers manages to do the vital work of taking race out of Zimbabwe's story and putting the heart and humanity back into it.  A must read for anyone who really wants to understand the extraordinary decency of ordinary Zimbabweans."
—Alexandra Fuller, author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight

"I read it in one sitting. I loved it.”
—Rian Malan, author of My Traitor's Heart

"Do we really need another memoir by a white Zimbabwean? The surprising answer is yes, if it's as good as Douglas Rogers' THE LAST RESORT….A ripping yarn….[moves] beyond memoir to become a chronicle of a nation. There is black and white, yes, but much more in the shades and tones of their mix—and it is in exploring them that Rogers, too, find his art."
—Time

"Zimbabwe in vertiginous decline is the backdrop for Douglas Rogers’s corrosively funny THE LAST RESORT, in which Roger’s parents, among the country’s last remaining white farmers, attract everyone from prostitutes and diamond dealers to their backpacker lodge."
—Vogue, featured in "The Season's Best Memoirs"

"Born in Zimbabwe, New York-based travel writer Rogers moves between two worlds with wit and grace while telling the dire-straits story of his childhood in Zimbabwe and his recent return....Angst, humor, beauty and terror mingle freely in his narrative....This rousing memoir should win over anyone with a taste for exotic can't-go-home-again stories.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"As President Mugabe's regime turns bell...

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 555 KB
• Print Length: 322 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0307407977
• Publisher: Crown; 1 edition (September 22, 2009)
• Sold by: Random House Digital, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B002PXFYIS
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,986 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #6 in Books > History > Africa > Zimbabwe

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars When Africa Moves Your Cheese, October 17, 2009

By 

Alan Brody (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe (Hardcover)

You might want to wait for Robert Mugabe and his henchman to exit Zimbabwe before you visit this resort, but you won't be able to put down this riveting book about a spunky senior couple and their story of survival. Set at the edge of a country that has descended into economic disaster and official thuggery, this is about people who just want to hang on - and they do!


Part adventure tale, part family memoir and trip into the mind of post-colonial Africa, this amiable but gripping story is a also compelling business case study of sorts - a bush version of Who Moved My Cheese? The Rogers family, a white Zimbabwean couple with roots going back several generations, retire to a craggy estate near Mutare in the East which they turn into a backpacker lodge with chalets, a swimming pool and al fresco bar.


They thrive for several years during the early benevolent period of the Mugabe regime when whites were welcome and the struggle against the old supremacist Rhodesian government forgotten. White emigrants even returned, many encouraged to buy and build in the new majority African-ruled Zimbabwe. That all began to change around 2000 when Mugabe saw his lifetime presidency challenged and he turned to sacking white farms as a way to maintain support.


This took the life out of the economy and with it, the tourist business. Luckily for the Rogers, their craggy estate had little farm value - especially after poachers took out their modest game stock - so the shambling estate avoided the expropriation list. But that still didn't pay the bills, so the author's Dad, Lyn Rogers kept coming up with one survival scheme after another in a way that could make for a third-world-dictator version of the Harvard Business School case study. These included: subletting the premises to a brothel manager, running a marijuana operation and then, most famously, the resort becoming a hang-out for illegal diamond dealers. All along, as their food options dwindle, his mother Ros, punctuates these chapters with a scheme of her own: improvised meal ideas for her proposed cooking book, Recipes for Disaster.


At the same time, the resort serves as a refugee camp for displaced whites, government officials' mistresses, Power Company engineers and political outsiders of several stripes. As for the illegal mining section, it is a relatively small a part of the book but thanks to the Blood Diamonds phenomenon and the kind of money at stake, this is what the media likes to talk about.


Written as a kind of family journal by our affable traveler, Douglas Rogers, we get drawn into many adventures in this troubled place. With a gentle inquisitiveness, he drinks and tokes with the locals who quickly recede from typical African stock characters into real people with their own unique drives, personality and logic. From the amusingly over-articulate John Agoneka to the savvy diamond dealer Fatso and his sidekick No Matter, this is the real Africa you don't find in a tourist package or your typical bwana book where the white explore and the blacks carry. Likewise, his portraits of the diehard whites who somehow adjusted from white domination to African majority rule and then suffer their disillusionment is matter-of fact yet compelling. When the whites go native such as when the matronly Miss Moneypenny, their "private banker" dances naked at the instruction of a witch doctor to settle a score, it seems perfectly reasonable under the circumstances.


While less lyrical perhaps than Peter Godwin's Mukiwa: White Boy in Africa or Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and the near hypnotic Scribbling the Cat, it more than makes up for it as a page-turner, eye-opener and to the pin-striped set, an entrepreneurial cliff-hanger. This is an African journey by way of a survival plan B, C & D where good doses of bribery and connivance fill in for Drucker and Due Diligence. All along, you feel like you're one of them, talking to these folks and listening to their stories in one of their own African languages.


Considering how dark the situation in Zimbabwe became with over 10,000% inflation, the book is almost optimistic. Compared to Godwin's When a Crocodile Eats the Sun it makes you feel like keeping an eye out for Mugabe's one-way ticket out of there so you can visit this unsinkable lodge and its irrepressible owners and staff. In the meantime, you could just read the book and breathe in a sigh of democratic relief.


Alan Brody is the author of White Shaka Boy on Amazon

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great read, October 2, 2009

By 

M. H. Kirvan (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe (Hardcover)

I was able to read an advanced copy and I really enjoyed it. It is an easy read and a remarkable story of the author's family in Zimbabwe. His family lineage goes back 300 years on the African Continent. His family is one of the last white land owners in Zimbabwe and the story is of his immediate family living through the transitions from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe to the last 10 years of "Land Reform". His parents ran a well regarded backpacker lodge in the eastern mountains of Zimbabwe all through the 1990's. In the last decade, despite inflation in the million percent range, as well as brutal and murderous land seizures, his parents are still miraculously on "their" land. It is their LAST RESORT! Douglas Rogers is quite the raconteur. His writing makes you ache to visit and see for your self the raw and natural beauty that is Zimbabwe. I recommend this book.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Small Gestures Between Ordinary People, February 21, 2010

By 

Jo-Anne Green (Boston, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe (Hardcover)

I can't stop thinking about this book. I recently visited my family in South Africa (I left in 1983), and I was struck -- yet again -- by their amazing sense of humor, despite all of their difficulties. This book reinforced the feeling of awe I have for them. It is the same feeling I now have for all of the people depicted in The Last Resort. Their lives are tragic, yet heroic; difficult beyond comprehension but full of determination and courage. What makes the book so powerful is how Rogers compels us to empathize with everyone, regardless of their race, ethnicity or political affiliation. They are simply human, born into circumstances not of their own making, swept up by events they can't quite control. Their actions, though sometimes unethical or immoral, are driven by an evolutionary will to survive. They are unapologetic, yet their ability to adapt and even change gives one hope in the human race. Ultimately, it is not power or money that allows Rogers' family to endure; rather, it is the small gestures -- of respect and kindness -- that keeps them on their land in their beloved Zimbabwe; their encounters with individuals, long forgotten, whose connections suddenly mean everything. This is a tale that teaches us that lives can be changed by tiny, seemingly inconsequential interactions between ordinary people, and reminds us to strive to be better every day.