527. Minority writing

I'm about to finish two books that i've been reading over several months. I happened upon them pretty randomly, one of them literally lying in front of me on a slow day. Each of them is written by a person against the mainstream, and i'm hesitant to call them minorities because their viewpoint are pretty radical and I've heard commentaries ridiculing their beliefs.

The first book, by Jack Cuozzo, is called Buried Alive. Cuozzo, a devout catholic, subscribes to the creationist theory of evolution, and it's an autobiographical tale of how the scientific community tried to bury his theory about Neanderthals, after X-Rays made by him in Louvre Museum in Paris revealed that the evolutionary claims did not match up.

I don't have an opinion about his theory, and I found his end of chapter sermons to be quite off putting. But it was a fascinating read simply because here was one man who refused to play nicely with the scientific community, and stuck to his beliefs that people lived several hundred years during the great flood to produce the current neanderthals.

The second book, a less controversial one by Peter Godwin, is called When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. Peter, a journalist born and brought up in Zimbabwe chronicles the zealous nationalism of Robert Mugabe, who systematically drove out the White farmers from their land.

Now Peter Godwin, is, of course, white, and when I mentioned to someone what I was reading, her immediate response was, the whites, after the oppression they subjected Africa to, pretty much deserved what was coming to them. The touching memoir also has a family revelation when Peter finds out that his father was a Polish jew, not a British gentile that they were led to believe all their lives. There are parts of the book that are just heartbreaking, and I underlined some of the paragraphs because I would like to revisit those writings.

An interesting coincidence happened when I was visiting Jeanne this weekend. She was playing music by Oliver Mtukudzi, who is also from Zimbabwe. I was thinking, what a coincidence, then I find Godwin refer to Mtukudzi's music in his prose four pages down. What are the chances of that?