For this book review, I have chosen the book written by Barbara Chase-Riboud entitled Hottentot Venus. This book is about a real woman from the KhoeKhoe nation and her tragic life. This young Khoisan, Ssehura, is an orphan in South Africa around 1700. After becoming a slave to a Dutch Afrikaner, her name changed to Saartjie (means little Sarah in Dutch). As the story continues, it explains more about Saartjie's culture, which includes preparing to be more desirable for marriage. In Khoisan culture, women massage their buttocks with a special ointment so that they swell and their genitals are also stretched. Because of this, Saartjie becomes a physical curiosity and sexual fetish for his white master. Later, the white master is convinced by an Englishman to send her to London to become a freak. There, along with other “things that should never have been born,” she becomes known as the “Hottentot Venus.” The story continued until the end, where Saartjie speaks as a corpse dissected and stripped of her femininity by scientists determined to confirm her as the missing link in the Great Chain of Being. The book opens with a note from the heroine to tell us more about how the Hottentot name came about. It is around 1619, when the Portuguese discover the KhoeKhoe nation on the east coast of South Africa. The Portuguese were then followed by the Dutch who called the Khoisan, Hottentot, which means "stammerer" in Dutch because of the way the Khoisan language sounds. The Dutch are the ones who introduced the clan to private property, land theft and fences. The English succeed the Dutch and organize the Khoisan into categories of Hottentots, Negroes, and Bushmen, claiming themselves and others as their whites. In January 1816, the story begins on Saartjie's birthday, which also falls on New Year's Day. Since it is a public holiday, the Paris circus or what Saartjie calls “the freak show” closes. In this chapter we learn that Saartjie has a serious illness, where he may have a fever and his chest aches as he coughs up blood. She has never heard of this type of disease in her clan and only until her white servant, Alice Unicorn, tells her about it, does she finally understand. Saartjie then goes on to describe the strange sight and how she must be in an eight by twelve foot bamboo cage, nearly naked in the cold, surrounded by white faces all showing looks of pity, horror and terror..