By interviewing the people who were most affected when South Africa dismantled its white supremacist institutions, Fairbanks marries the overarching story the country's turbulent apartheid history with Black and white individuals' intimate experiences before and after 1994, when so much—and so little—changed ... As Fairbanks vividly demonstrates, South Africa's complicated past continues to define the lives of Black Africans, white Afrikaners and immigrants from formerly colonized African countries such as Mozambique and Angola. The Inheritors covers a lot of ground, capturing Black heroes like Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, as well as castigated white politicians like Frederik Willem de Klerk. She also examines how the rest of the world has handled racism and colonialism before and after 1994, including Angola's own liberation in 1975 and the ongoing turmoil in 21st-century America. Glimmering throughout is the humanity she manages to find in all of it ... There are lessons here for readers the world over, especially as South Africa joins the global marketplace and as the U.S. continues to grapple with the human cost of racism. Fairbanks compels us to pay attention, learn and, above all, care.

As she reports, Fairbanks falls in love with South Africa in all its beauty and complexity. Her curiosity seems boundless — a boundlessness that, translated into writing, can at times be distracting. As Fairbanks follows her main characters, she gets swept up in the rich tapestry of the country and includes an abundance of personal memories, fables, speculation and musings. She seems to have spoken to or listened in on the conversations of nearly every one of the hundreds of people whose paths she crossed during the years she spent working on this book ... Fairbanks’s empathetic, comprehensive reporting shines when she dispenses with tangents and tells it straight, providing insight into how ordinary people build lives in the aftermath of political upheaval.

Fairbanks is too good a writer to resort to crude psychologizing, but she repeatedly suggests that there is a terrible price to pay for trying to ignore how people see their own situations; the undeniable material facts of everything that happens to them is often inseparable from an emotional reality ... In addition to being an elegant writer, Fairbanks is unfailingly empathetic; she draws out tangled emotions with such skill and sensitivity that I was mystified by a few awkward analogies ... More resonant are the echoes she finds in the current American situation, where multiple reckonings are happening at once, but in comparative slow-motion.

The most dynamic storyteller at the most interesting cocktail party could scarcely achieve more than Eve Fairbanks has achieved in The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning. How this achievement lands with readers will depend on whether they want more than storytelling from a book on this topic ... As these lives unspool languorously across the book’s 34 chapters, the post-apartheid world comes vividly into focus. The main characters’ stories branch into stories about other people, and from there into wonderfully accessible summaries of South African history, politics and policy. Readers who already know something about the country will find helpful reminders and moving examples. Less-knowledgeable readers will find concise and engaging points of entry ... Fairbanks also shows considerable insight into the challenges of post-apartheid moral psychology. Her subjects grapple with racially freighted emotions like shame and guilt, pity and penitence, and she draws useful lessons from their efforts. A closer relationship to the vast scholarly literature on these issues wouldn’t hurt, but one happily exempts writers from scholarly specialization when their work provides other compensations ... Unfortunately, Fairbanks blocks the path to those compensations by clogging the book with secondary characters ... Their stories are richly drawn and often moving. But the book collects them haphazardly, and scatters them across chapters that are uniformly (with one exception) and uninformatively named for one of the three main characters. One comes away wishing for more authorial guidance about how to thematize these narrative riches ... A more equitable intimacy might have led Fairbanks to say more about why she went to South Africa and how she met her characters. (We never find out, on either score).

... a sensitive, often engrossing portrait of the nation during and after apartheid ... While the author focuses on three people—anti-apartheid activist Dipuo, her daughter Malaika, and former army recruit and proud Afrikaans lawyer Christo—the many other narrative strands sometimes trail into tangents, not all of which are relevant. The beginning of the book is somewhat disorienting, as the author does little to ground readers in the overall context. Some of the sections of the text are engaging, while others are dry and detached despite the moving nature of the topic. The most memorable parts of the book involve Dipuo and Malaika, both of whom emerge as incredibly strong, even heroic characters. While the author’s depth of detail into their lives is important when considering the tumultuous atmosphere in which they live, some readers may be startled by the candid discussions of assault and rape. Though these passages are necessary to convey the gravity of the situations, they will likely distress unguarded readers suffering from their own trauma. The scope of the author’s research is impressive, and she is to be commended for taking care to thoroughly and compassionately expose apartheid and the many complex effects that ripple out to everyday people, demonstrating appropriate nuance while allowing no space for the tolerance of oppression. Though the narrative is disjointed in places, readers won’t soon forget Dipuo and Malaika ... A thoughtful and informative work that could have benefitted from a more cohesive structure.

Fairbanks’s vivid reportage depicts a South Africa awash in racial unease and false consciousness ... Distinguished by its sympathetic yet clear-eyed viewpoint, this vital study lays bare the complex, agonizing predicaments that flow from South Africa’s tragic past.