*A New York Times Notable Book*

*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice*

*A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year*

Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his middle-class Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him. This world came to him as a chaos of loud and colorful sounds: the hair dryers at his mother's beauty parlor, black mamba bicycle bells, mechanics in Nairobi, the music of Michael Jackson-all punctuated by the infectious laughter of his brother and sister, Jim...