Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir

When veteran reporter Neely Tucker, a white man from Mississippi, came to Zimbabwe, his goal was to report on the country’s political meltdown. But when a doctor at an orphanage forced him and his black wife to take home an infant abandoned at birth in order to save its life, their lives swiftly focused around adopting that infant. Difficult in the best of times, the adoption proved to be very nearly impossible in the anti-white, anti-Western, anti-American dictatorship of Robert Mugabe. When the Tuckers’ very lives were being threatened, how could they adopt a child? Though spat upon by officials, they became consumed with saving baby Chipo, and the travails they underwent only make their story more harrowing and more uplifting.