Mr. Godwin recounts how people calling themselves “war vets,” ex-combatants from the war of independence, began arriving on white-owned farms and refused to leave, and how these “wovits” — most of whom weren’t really war vets, he says, but a ragtag collection of Mugabe supporters and unemployed youths — terrorized farmers with AK-47’s and machetes.  He recounts how some wovits took names like Hitler Hunzvi, Comrade Satan and Stalin Mau Mau, the better to terrorize the population. And he recounts how white Zimbabweans and many middle-class blacks readied “gap bags” in case they needed to quickly flee. (“Gap bags because that’s all you have when you ‘take the gap,’ that is, flee from the country through a pass — a gap — in the mountains, the reverse of the trek made by the pioneers in their covered wagons.”)  As white liberals the Godwins themselves have been irrevocably scarred by events. In 1978, weeks before her wedding, the author’s older sister Jain ran into an army ambush that was preparing to attack guerrillas in a roadside village: Jain, her fiancé and their best man all died. More recently Mr. Godwin’s elderly father was ambushed right outside the gates to his home: knocked on the ground, kicked in the chest, his car and wallet stolen. Mavis, the Godwins’ recently retired housekeeper whom they regarded as a member of the family for more than 20 years, turned up with a group of thugs, demanding money. And street hawkers set up stands just outside “Fort Godwin,” sleeping under the Godwins’ bougainvillea hedge, which one day caught fire, leaving a gaping hole in the fence.  “We remain totally exposed,” Mr. Godwin writes. “Anyone can peer straight into our inner sanctum, the little patio where my parents habitually sit on their white garden furniture under the jasmine pergola and drink their weak tea and read their plastic-covered library books.” Every night the elder Godwins barricade themselves in their house, hoping they will not be attacked.  Although his father’s health is failing and his mother is in desperate need of a hip transplant, they adamantly refuse to leave. His mother, at the age of 73, continues to work as a doctor at a hospital, though she “is weighed down by the burden” of having to tell dozens of people a day that they have an incurable disease called AIDS.  The author’s younger sister Georgina confides her worry that their parents may be falling victim to “boiled-frog syndrome.” “In experiments,” she explains, “if you put a frog in a shallow saucepan of water and heat up the water very slowly, the frog will never quite notice how hot it’s getting. It won’t actually jump out. Until it’s too late. Until it’s boiled alive.”  And so, after his father suffers a heart attack, Mr. Godwin begins commuting back and forth between Zimbabwe and his home in New York, tending to his parents as best he can. During one visit he notices a new photo in their house, a photo of a middle-aged couple with a young girl. When he asks who they are, his mother tells him: “These people are Dad’s parents and his younger sister — your grandparents and your aunt.”  In short order the author learns that his father is not the man he always thought he was, that “George Godwin, this Anglo-African in a safari suit and desert boots, with his clipped British accent” is an invention, that his father was actually a Polish Jew named Kazimierz a k a Kazio Goldfarb, who was sent away to a British boarding school in 1939, joined the Allied effort in the war, and eventually made his way to Africa, where he secured work as an engineer. Both his mother and sister died in the Holocaust.  Although George Godwin’s observation that “being a white” in Zimbabwe “is starting to feel a bit like being a Jew in Poland in 1939” ignores the horrors of colonialism that Europeans inflicted on Africa, it captures an emotional truth in his own life: his apprehension of the innate precariousness of life, his sense of being part of a despised minority, and his realization that his life, in a sense, has come full circle.  The revelation about his father’s past not only leaves Mr. Godwin with a new understanding of why his parents are so reluctant to leave the home they have made for themselves in Zimbabwe but also leads him to reappraise his relationship with his taciturn father, and his own identity as a white African. His account of his family’s history and his parents’ lives in an increasingly desperate Zimbabwe is written with the unsparing eye of a journalist and the tender, conflicted emotions of a son. He has written a powerful and deeply affecting book about a family trying to ride the tsunami of change in a country that is coming asunder, a “tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface,” Mr. Godwin writes, “and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea.”  Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E27 of the New York edition with the headline: Dreadful Omens From Above, Worse Portents From Below. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Peter Godwin gives us a searing account of what has happened to the besieged and battered land of Zimbabwe in the last 30-odd years.