Finished: Burger's Daughter (Gordimer) The story of Rosa Burger, the daughter of white South African revolutionaries in the 1960's who are trying to fight for rights for the oppressed native people. Her parents, Lionel and Cathy Burger are both imprisoned, her mother when Rosa is just fourteen. After her mother dies in prison, her father, a talented doctor and near hero to the other radicals, eventually does as well. Rosa is not allowed to leave the country. Her entire life she has been raised around the revolutionists, their ideas and their actions. Rosa, though, doesn't want to follow in her parents' footsteps. She's wants more than anything to travel to Europe. When she's 27, she finally gets permission for a one year VISA with strict rules put in place about who she can and cannot be in contact with. She knows she will be watched. She goes to stay with her father's first wife, Katya, and lives among her Bohemian acquaintances who float in and out of Katya's house. It's a close-knit group of friends who embrace Rosa. Rosa even falls in love and has an affair, thinking she can find peace and happiness going to London with the man. One night, though, she finds herself at a meeting of several former South African revolutionaries and recognizes her childhood best friend, the son of the servant of the house...a young black boy who the Burgers treated like one of their own, and she excitedly approaches him. She hasn't seen him almost 20 years. She has no idea what he's been doing all this time. When she calls him by his childhood nickname he bristles and tells her his given African name. They end up having a long conversation where he criticizes both her idealistic view of their childhood and her father's attempts at "making things better for the black people" when they should have never been suppressed in the first place and should have been given the power to help themselves. He basically gives her a good verbal slap in the face that opens her eyes to what he and his family were really going through when they were young children. This prompts Rosa to go back to Africa and help as a nurse at a rehabilitation center for children who have been born crippled, or crippled by war, and then as it happens, more recently, injured by the shootings currently (1977) being perpetrated by police on random groups of black teenagers and children. As the country revolts, they revolt against even the white people who are trying to help them. Rosa is eventually arrested and imprisoned for conspiracy because she went to the meeting in London. The book ends off with Rosa still in prison and writing to her father's second wife, Katya. Burger's Daughter, written by Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer, was a compelling book, but written in a stream of conscious manner, even the dialogue. It was difficult at times to follow, and took me a long time to read, but I'm very glad I did. I enjoy expanding my exposure to events and countries that I've never really read about.