Reviews for The retinal basis of vision

The average rating for The retinal basis of vision based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-03-29 00:00:00 Stephanie Verdream I liked the way Lamb alternates chapters between the point of view of a black woman working as a maid and nanny on a white-owned farm and her boss, a white man who grew up in Zimbabwe and whose farm was taken over by some of the young thugs who have flourished under Mugabe’s rule in the last 15 years. Though I felt Lamb was too kind in her assessment of white rule during the 100+ years that Rhodesians clung to power, she managed to bring out the excesses of the liberation soldiers during the war and demonstrate Mugabe’s decline into dictatorship (which did not come out of nowhere, as many people seem to think). I wrote a master’s thesis in African history on Zimbabwe’s liberation war, on the propaganda of both sides, and argued vociferously that it was easy to see the seeds of Mugabe’s later obsessions and madness as early as 1983, if one cared to look. (Most of the world didn’t care to look. They weren’t concerned about the tens of thousands of blacks who were murdered in the early 80s and whose bodies were dumped into pits outside of Bulawayo…but they sure have paid attention to the less than 25 white farmers who were murdered in the last ten years….The truth is, the western world doesn’t care when blacks are killing blacks. We just care when blacks kill whites. I hate to sound so cynical but history bears this out time and time again.) I thought the story could have been more successful if she’d paid more attention to narrative structure, but I did like how she weaved so much of Zimbabwe’s history into this thoroughly modern story.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-11-12 00:00:00 Daniel M Witz Even though Mugabe's reign of terror has pretty much fallen of the radar of us in the West, the tragedy for Zimbabwe and its people is still very much there. Christina Lamb is one of the best foreign correspondents of our time and this is a truly moving account of the tragic fall that Zimbabwe took from the cliff under the misrule of Mugabe and his henchmen (who became very rich of course). Essential reading for everyone interested in the post-colonial history of the African continent.