"Boet," said Kevin, "there’s a jazz somewhere down by the assembly hall where okes can do what they smaak, and I hear from reliable sources that it’s lekker down there."

Like most children of the 1970s and 1980s, Richard Poplak grew up obsessed with pop culture. Watching The Cosby Show, listening to Guns N’Roses, and quoting lines from Mad Max movies were part of his everyday life. But in Richard’s country, South Africa, censorship in the newspapers, military training at school, and different rules for different races were also just a part of everyday life. It was, as Richard says, "a different kind of normal."

Ja, No, Man articulates what it was like to live through Apartheid as a white, Jewish boy in suburban Johannesburg. Told with extraordinary humour and self-awareness, Richard’s story brings his gradual understanding of the difference between his country and the rest of the world vividly to life. A startlingly original memoir that veers sharply from the quotidian to the bizarre and back again, Ja, No, Man is an enlightening, darkly hilarious, and, at times, disturbing read.

"Poplak stitches together the insults and indignities—mundane, suburban, absurd, tragic–of apartheid in its horrible death throes with such skill, such honesty and above all, such drop-everything-and-laugh-out-loud humour that I found myself having to re-read whole passages just to see what they sounded like without my shrieks of laughter thrown in. Apartheid was a disgusting experiment but Poplak's bottom's up view shows how it was able to work for so long—the complicit agreement of so many to be so violent for so long. Ja, No, Man is an absolute must-read for anyone who was there, anyone who wants to know what it was like to be there and anyone who hopes we never go there again—in other words, a must-read for everyone."
—Alexandra Fuller, author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

"Honest, witty, and alive with the politics of imagination, Poplak’s memories writhe and spasm like a severed lizard’s tail. Home may be another time, and the past a distant, tragic country, but a memoir can still deliver news."
—Ryan Knighton, author of Cockeyed: A Memoir

"Brilliant"
—NNNNN from NOW Magazine