From The Thornveld Book Reviews – Welcome
  • Guilty and Proud: An MK Soldier’s Memoir of Exile, Prison and Freedom

    Marion Sparg, Guilty and Proud: An MK Soldier’s Memoir of Exile, Prison and Freedom (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2024) EXTRAORDINARY and challenging circumstances raising matters of conscience can have unpredictable outcomes. Among the small group of […]

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  • Available Light: Omar Badsha and the Struggle for Change in South Africa

    Daniel Magaziner, Available Light: Omar Badsha and the Struggle for Change in South Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2025) Daniel Magaziner, Available Light: Omar Badsha and the Struggle for Change in South Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2025) ARTIST, […]

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  • Election 2024 South Africa: Countdown to Coalition

    Collette Schulz-Herzenberg and Roger Southall (eds), Election 2024 South Africa: Countdown to Coalition (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2024) IT was widely assumed from the start of the 2024 general and provincial election campaigns that the ANC would […]

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  • Together Apart: The Story of Living in Apartheid

    Xolisa Guzula and Athambile Masola, Together Apart: The Story of Living in Apartheid (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2024) NO one under 35 can have a first-hand understanding of life in apartheid South Africa. To many of today’s […]

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  • The Super Cadres: ANC Misrule in the Age of Deployment

    Pieter du Toit, The Super Cadres: ANC Misrule in the Age of Deployment (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2024) STATE capture nearly bankrupted South Africa. Its mechanics and perpetrators were well documented by investigative journalists and then […]

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  • The Bams of Grasslands Farm: A Family History

    Seán Morrow, The Bams of Grasslands Farm: A Family History (Johannesburg: Staging Post, 2024) WHAT might the course of South African history have been had the Christian African middle class of the nineteenth century been […]

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  • Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators who Want to Run the World

    Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators who Want to Run the World (London: Allen Lane, 2024) DICTATORS and dictatorship are hardly new: they provided much of the darkness of the twentieth century, often in extreme […]

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  • Karla's Choice

    Karla’s Choice: A John le Carré Novel

    Nick Harkaway, Karla’s Choice: A John le Carré Novel (London: Penguin Viking, 2024) GEORGE Smiley, the anti-hero agent, appears in nine novels written by John le Carré who died in 2020. Smiley has a vast […]

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  • Maughan

    I Will Not Be Silenced

    Karyn Maughan, I Will Not Be Silenced (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2024) BETWEEN 2023 and 2024, the international press freedom monitoring organisation Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) downgraded South Africa’s rating from 25 to 38 among 180 […]

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  • Capitec

    Capitec: Stalking Giants

    T.J. Strydom, Capitec: Stalking Giants (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2024) THE LIBERATION of the majority of South Africans after 1990 has all too often been seen in terms of the vote. This was always going to […]

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