BOOK SA – Reviews

Verdict: carrot

Numerous works have been published in recent years on the southern African liberation wars, each good in their way, but Dr Richard Wood provides an outstandingly well-researched book and accompanying DVD.

It concerns the start, strategy and tactics of the Rhodesian Fireforce concept, rather than individuals’ own experiences. By so doing, the book places many of the bush-war biographies into perspective.

To defend white Rhodesia with an army strike force of no more than 1 500 regular soldiers, while sanctions were imposed on both equipment and technology, was a gargantuan task.

Wood expertly elaborates on how this dilemma – together with lessons learned from other low-intensity conflicts (Malaya, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Portuguese Africa) – influenced the thinking, sowing the seed that eventually led to Fireforce.

• Complete review at IOL Tonight

Book Details

• Counter-strike from the Sky: The Rhodesian All Arms in the War in the Bush – 1974-1980 by Richard Wood
  EAN: 9781920143336
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Verdict: carrot

SNAKES might not be everyone’s favourite animals and in fact the mere mention of these much-maligned critters sends icy chills down many people’s spines. But a little knowledge and understanding goes a long way towards eliminating some fear and even inspiring a curiosity about these beady-eyed animals.

There are 151 different snake species in Southern Africa, of which only 16 are considered dangerous to humans. Each family of snake is given a double page spread with vital identification markers in the “telltale signs” box, which comes with each of the species.

There is a basic introduction to snakes, which includes snake identification following a six-step method, snake behaviour, habits and habitats. There is also a first aid advice block with information pertaining to snake bites and venom in the eye.

A good book for any wildlife enthusiast or gardener to keep handy.

– Annette Bayne

• This review first appeared in The Citizen. For more Citizen content on BOOK SA, click here

Book Details

• What’s that Snake?: A Starter’s Guide to the Snakes of Southern Africa by Johan Marais
  EAN: 9781770073739
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Verdict: carrot
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IN 2004, 64 alleged mercenaries were arrested in Zimbabwe.

They were en route to Equatorial Guinea where they had planned to overthrow the country’s president Obiang Nguema. This story of the incident is now updated to include Simon Mann’s abduction to Equatorial Guinea, his revealing interview with Channel 4, and the trial.

This is an incredible tale told by Adam Roberts, who followed the Equatorial Guinea coup story since the detention of the plane in Zimbabwe. He travelled to South Africa, Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe, interviewing many different people, to get the fullest
story possible.

Roberts writes this book with an energy and style that keeps you turning the page, riveted, often in sheer disbelief at some of the chances taken, the assumptions made and the many mishaps, that ultimately lead to the arrest of Simon Mann and the mercenaries.

It reads like a boys own adventure, thick with ambition, intrigue and daring.

–Annette Bayne
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Verdict: carrot
To be deemed “a keenly collected and expertly packaged anthology of urgent and vital writing” is high praise indeed:

The writing coming out of Africa today has an unparalleled urgency. The stakes are high. In 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the Nigerian military for exposing the unseemly details of the relationship between Shell Oil and the junta of General Sani Abacha. Reading through the biographical notes of Gods and Soldiers, one feels the pervasive violence that lurks beneath these stories and the lives of their authors: the Algerian novelist Aziz Chouaki received multiple death threats from Islamic fundamentalists, forcing him to move to France; the Nigerian poet and novelist Chris Abani was imprisoned and tortured based on the “evidence” of his first novel; and the Kenyan writer Ngūgī wa Thiong’o penned an entire novel on toilet paper after being imprisoned for his 1977 play I Will Marry When I Want. These writers are writing not because they have just earned their MFAs and are eager to enter the marketplace, but because they have to.

• Complete review in The Brooklyn Rail

• Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing homepage

Book Details

• Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing edited by Rob Spillman
  EAN: 9780143114734
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Verdict: carrot. But mostly just a summary.

In the letter he addresses to his wife, Karina, in the final section of his memoir, André Brink, claims that he has “persistently refused … to write an autobiography” always having “felt uncomfortable with the artificiality and self-centredness of such a project.” Readers of A Fork in the Road will be pleased that he has overcome his qualms. While the work is at times — perhaps inescapably — self-indulgent, it is essentially an absorbing account of the influences and experiences that have shaped the man and his writing.

While in his youth Brink accepted unquestioningly the political and social perspectives of his parents, his thinking about South Africa was challenged during a sojourn in Paris (1959-61) when — among other things — he was deeply affected by the news of Sharpeville. A subsequent sabbatical in the same city, during which he witnessed the student riots of May 1968, highlighted his sense of being out of his own context and crystallised his commitment both to South Africa and to writing, the only way in which he might tackle the injustices of apartheid. Notable publications followed, not least of which was A Dry White Season, Brink’s account of arrest and torture, begun shortly before the actual arrest and torture of Steve Biko in 1977. While initially unable to proceed with his fiction in the face of such fact, Brink finally realised that writing the book was “not an obscenity, or an irrelevance, but an imperative.”

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Verdict: carrot
A new memoir of the “I grew up in white, apartheid South Africa (but now live somewhere else)” variety finds favour in the UK. Plus, we bring you an interview with the author, Jason Donald.

South Africa can be a brutal spot for human relations. This novel opens with a storm of monstrous hailstones, some the size of a fist, deftly symbolising the strife in the story to follow. Alex is 12, the eldest of two brothers in an impoverished white neighbourhood during the 1980s. At his age, children possess a fleeting maturity, but also a vulnerability: poor mentoring and mistreatment can cause serious problems. Alex is delicately poised.

His father, Bruce, resorts to every trick going to get by. Part of this might relate to low status – maybe he judges it fair enough to blag and bully his way to a few extra bucks. Bruce involves his sons in a petty fraud in a department store, and then a higher-level con, when he torches the family car for the insurance money. When Alex’s younger brother starts being bullied at school, Bruce shows the boys some self-defence moves. He is a braggart, not above showing off his physical prowess at their expense.

• Complete review in the Independent (UK)

CLOSE YOUR EYES AND REMEMBER being 12. There are people who can’t do that, whose memories have just drained away, who can’t recall what it felt like to be on the cusp of the grown-up world while still not understanding vast swathes of it. And every time Jason Donald meets one of them, he’s surprised because he’s just the opposite.

Choke Chain, his astonishingly assured debut novel, is the proof. In it, Alex, his 12-year-old protagonist, is told by his mother that God has put a special camera in our heads, and that all we have to do to remember anything is to blink our eyes andsay “Click”. There’s a credibility about Donald’s prose that suggests he might have been blinking and clicking for years.

To Alex’s brutal garage mechanic father Bruce, life is about “winners and losers – whatever it takes”. In practice, this means forever doing down the little guy, bullying his way to refunds from shop assistants, scamming car insurance companies, never taking no for an answer. If that’s winning, losing is having to make time for other people, feeling empathy, care or concern for others, not being able to enforce absolute obedience.

• Complete review/interview in The Scotsman

• Choke Chain homepage

Book Details

• Choke Chain by Jason Donald
  EAN: 9780224087186
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Verdict: carrot
“A startling insight into contemporary SA” says anonymous of Sarah Nuttall’s book of essays, Entanglements. The reviewer’s penchant for half-sentences runs from the headline all the way to the end of the article, which concludes: “Compelling reading.”

From her base at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, over the last 10 years or so Sarah Nuttall has developed a reputation for a notably sparky, innovative approach to the reading of contemporary South Africa. Wide-ranging and often startling, her new book bears this out.

While the post-apartheid present tends to be addressed in terms of “difference”, Nuttall argues for the usefulness of “entanglement”. This, on the grounds that “entanglement” addresses both difference and sameness, and the shifting sands that lie between. This book, then, “explores ways we find of living together, of occupying the city, secrets we keep or tell, the life of the body, our desire for things, the darkness of sex”. A mesh of entanglements (as nets both trap and save).

In her introduction, Nuttall sets out a ground-plan for her book. One feature she omits to mention here is that her study is almost entirely focused on the city. The following chapter reviews that crucial and contentious question – post-1994, how much has changed?

• Complete review in the Sunday Independent

Book Details

• Entanglement: Literary and cultural reflections on post-apartheid by Sarah Nuttall
  EAN: 9781868144761
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Verdict: carrot
Diane Awerbuck, a new mother herself, finds much to admire in uMama.

When my mother got to the end of her considerable tether, she would stand with her hands on her hips and shout, “I hope you have kids one day! Then you’ll see what it’s like!”

It didn’t happen as often as it ought to have, that parental curse.

My mother was coping with six children from various parents, a full-time teaching career and several successively difficult husbands. Mostly I remember her standing in her little red apron, stirring something in a pot that would form part of the ‘proper’ supper she cooked for us all every night, while we recited our times tables and did our reading homework for her.

• Complete review in the Sunday Times

• uMama: Recollections of South African Mothers and Grandmothers homepage

Book Details

• uMama: Recollections of South African Mothers and Grandmothers compiled and edited by Marion Keim
  EAN: 9781415200674
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Gory crime fiction such as may be found in Joanne Hichen’s anthology of it, Bad Company, might at first blush not appear to be Michiel Heyns’ cup of tea.

But the author of ravishingly highbrow novels like Bodies Politic tucks right in, and comes out the other end well-satisfied: “Most people like a brisk story-line, a tight plot, resourceful characters and a plot reversal or two. Of these pleasures, this collection offers an abundance”.

Here’s Heyns on the kinky sex gone wrong, corrupt cops and xenophobic violence of Bad Company:
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RW Johnson’s big thick book on SA’s slim stretch of years as a democracy, South Africa’s Brave New World, has caused a veritable civil war among SA book reviewers.

We’ve seen Shaun de Waal and Paul Holden split down the literary Mason-Dixon line that Johnson draws, for example – and now Hermann Giliomee, Ivan Fallon and Christopher Merrett join the different camps. For Giliomee, the book is “the most important analysis of the country to emerge since 1994″; for Fallon, Johnson’s thesis is not “sustained by what is visibly happening”; and for Merrett, Johnson’s conclusions “cannot be faulted”.

Overall, then, more carrots than sticks for the author – which, it must be said, has been the pattern since the book’s debut:
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