There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
Moe Shaik, The ANC Spy Bible: Surviving across Enemy Lines (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2020) A MEMOIR might be loosely regarded as autobiography with benefits; or, in more literary terms, poetic licence. Any biographical account described […]
Shirley Gunn and Shanil Haricharan, Voices from the Underground: Eighteen Life Stories from Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Ashley Kriel Detachment (Cape Town: Penguin, 2019) The MK unit known as the Ashley Kriel Detachment (AKD) had a […]
Jan-Jan Joubert, Will South Africa be Okay?: 17 Key Questions (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2019) THIS book has a novel approach to South Africa’s current condition: responses to the most frequently asked questions posed to political […]
George Soros, In Defence of Open Society (John Murray, 2019) A LIST of George Soros’s low-life detractors – from big fish like Vladimir Putin to small fry like Julius Malema flourishing in a groundswell of […]
Adriaan Basson, Blessed by Bosasa: Inside Gavin Watson’s State Capture Cult (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball) THE GRAND corruption of Gavin Watson’s facilities management company, Bosasa, detailed at length in Adriaan Basson’s book will be familiar to […]
John le Carré, Agent Running in the Field (London: Viking) WITH a degree of inevitability, the Brexit novel has arrived. Happily, one of the authors is the 88-year-old John le Carré, an articulate Remainer. There […]
Crispian Olver, A House Divided: The Feud that Took Cape Town to the Brink (Jonathan Ball, 2019) CAPE Town has a reputation, based on consistent clean audits and much evidence of administrative efficiency, as the […]
Edward Snowden, Permanent Record (Macmillan, 2019) THE first, and most important, point to make about Edward Snowden is that he is not Julian Assange. Snowden is a whistleblower in the classic sense who identified illegality, […]
Benjamin Pogrund (ed.), Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe: New Reflections (Jonathan Ball, 2019) WRITTEN out of history – that is fair comment on the life of founding Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) president Robert Sobukwe. First imprisoned by […]
Caryn Dolley, The Enforcers: Inside Cape Town’s Deadly Nightclub Battles (Jonathan Ball, 2019) RATIONAL people might assume that there is a clear fault line between police and criminals; yet even in the best-ordered societies the […]