Research Catalog

The jack bank : a memoir of a South African childhood

Title

The jack bank : a memoir of a South African childhood / Glen Retief.

Author

Retief, Glen.

Publication

New York : St. Martin's Press, 2011.

Supplementary Content

Available Online

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schomburg Center to submit a request in person.	Text	Use in library	Sc E 12-203	Schomburg Center - Research & Reference

Details

Description

x, 275 p.; 25 cm.

Summary

Glen Retief's childhood was at once recognizably ordinary and brutally unusual. Raised in the middle of a game preserve where his father worked, Retief's warm nuclear family was a preserve of its own, against chaotic forces just outside its borders: a childhood friend's uncle was also the leader of a death squad, while his cultured grandfather quoted Shakespeare over sodas and abused Glen's sister in his antique Victorian living room. But it was when Retief was sent to boarding school, at age twelve, that he was truly exposed to human cruelty and frailty. When the prefects were caught torturing younger boys, they invented "the jack bank," where underclassmen could save beatings and draw on them later to atone for their supposed infractions.

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