The Power of One

Author: Bryce Courtenay
Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2008, ISBN   978-0-345-41005-4
Lexile Measure: 940L
Classification: Fiction

Summary:
The book’s main character, Peekay, is a young boy (growing into a man) who is relatively unsupervised.  He spends most the book either at boarding school, traveling to and from boarding school, or roaming around the outdoors with his friends.  Although a few female characters appear in the book, some of whom are strong role models to Peekay, the book takes place in a man’s world.  
The book’s main character, Peekay, is a young boy (growing into a man) who is relatively unsupervised.  He spends most the book either at boarding school, traveling to and from boarding school, or roaming around the outdoors with his friends.  Although a few female characters appear in the book, some of whom are strong role models to Peekay, the book takes place in a man’s world.  

---

---

Language:
Peekay, his friends, and the adult males curse frequently. Profanity includes:

• d*mn
  
• h*ll
  
• sh*t
  
• b*stard
  
• p*ss
  
• f*ck
  
• *ss
  
• b*tch
  

Words are used in context and are not gratuitous.  Unfortunately, neither is the liberally word, “n*gger” that the whites use habitually to refer to Africans.  


Drug and Alcohol Use:
There are references to drinking beer, and smoking.

• Some of the adult characters drink to excess.
  
• Drinking appears to contribute to the death of one female character.
  

Violence and Crime:

• At his first boarding school, Peekay was subjected to horrible bullying at the hands of his classmates.  Among other things, they urinated on him, beat him, and tried to force him to eat feces.  When he refused, they killed his pet chicken, Granpa Chook.  See, for example, pp. 44-50.  The adults also beat him, including the headmistress who hit him on the ear so hard that she severed part of his ear.
  
• Peekay does the homework of an older student so he can graduate (and stop beating Peekay).
  
• After an encounter on a train with an up and coming boxer, Peekay devoted his life to becoming a boxing champion.  The book contains numerous, vivid descriptions of brutal boxing matches and the gambling that accompanied them.  
  
• Native Africans are abused verbally and physically throughout the book by the whites who view them as little more than animals. One in particular is tortured and murdered by a prison guard.  See, for example, pp. 188-189, 217, 230-237, 300-305.  
  
• In addition to his boxing matches, Peekay gets in numerous fights.  See, for example, pp. 220-221.  
  
• At the end of the book, Peekay realizes that a man who is threatening him in a bar is, in fact, one of the boys who used to torture him at boarding school.  Peekay decides to get his revenge on the man by beating him and carving his initials into the man’s arm.  Doing so gives Peekay a sense of peace.

Sexual Content:

• Although this has nothing to do with sex, the book opens with Peekay describing his infancy suckling at the breast of his African wet nurse. Later, when he meets her son (his opponent in a boxing match), they state that they suckled at the same breasts and, so, are brothers.
  
• Peekay’s classmates made fun of his circumcised penis.  They also force Peekay (who does not know the word) to call his mother a whore.  
  
• Peekay discusses his feelings, including his sexual interests, while going through puberty.  Among other things, he says, “Puberty had taken a fierce and urgent grip on us, and the fantasy of f*cking was never more than an unuttered sentence away.”  See, pp. 358-360, 384-385.  
  
• An adolescent Peekay discusses the whores who service men working in the diamond mines.  See, pp. 479-481.

Other:

• The Power of One is set in South Africa during Apartheid.  A major theme is the racism displayed and experienced by its characters.  The early part of the book focuses on the discrimination Peekay, an English child, endures because of his national origin at the hands of the Boars.  
  
• The book discusses the religious beliefs of the African natives, including their belief (and Peekay’s) in the power of the local witch doctor.  See, for example, pp. 8-16.  It also discusses Peekay’s mother’s Christian beliefs which, among other things, led her to dismiss Peekay’s African nanny when she wouldn’t convert. Peekay views her religious beliefs with suspicion and antagonism.  On p. 141, he tells her that the Lord is a “sh*thead.”  See, also, pp. 260-265.  Religious beliefs of Peekay’s friends (and how they relate to Christianity) are described throughout. See, for example, pp. 170-171.  
  
• One of Peekay’s friends, Morris, discusses the fact that history is written by the winners, and that they can tell it the way they want to, glossing over “vomit and the sh*t, the blood and the horses with their guts blown away, the cries of men as they sh*t their pants and drowned in their own blood.”  See, pp. 365-366.  Anyone uncomfortable with the notion that history is the story the winners want to tell will be uncomfortable with Morris’s compelling argument.
  

---

Other Helpful Reviews:

• Scholastic
  
• Good Reads
  
• Teen Ink