Archive for the ‘News’ Category
by Luso on May 16th, 2012
In February this year, German-based publishing company Brandes & Apsel released Orange-Senqu: Artery of Life: Water and Peace in Southern Africa by award-winning journalist Thomas Kruchem.
Orange-Senqu: Artery of Life attempts to provide a simultaneously historical, contemporary and personal account of the Orange-Senqu River basin, a large water catchment area which serves communities in four southern African countries.
Covering a wide range of issues regarding development and access to water, the book offers a chance for the outsider to see the area with new eyes. Kruchem achieves this by combining personal anecdote with historical detail and, while some of the details may seem unnecessary, he displays a passion for his subject which carries with it a respect for the region and its people. The book is accompanied by a multi-media “Orange-Senqu River Awareness Kit” DVD.
San of the Kalahari; mountain farmers in Lesotho; township activists near Johannesburg; diamond miners at the mouth; scientists and eco-philosophers – these are just a sampling of the scores of people interviewed by Thomas Kruchem to tell the rich and multi-faceted story of this great African river.
It is a story steeped in cultural history, economic opportunity and overwhelming environmental challenge. And the whole thing is told against the backdrop of a global problem – the escalating shortage of potable water.
Water shortage is one of humanity’s greatest challenges. It comes into sharp focus through the real-world issues faced along the river named Orange in South Africa and Senqu in Lesotho. In addressing these issues this compelling and beautifully illustrated book is part travelogue, part in-depth analysis and part a compendium of touching stories. The attached “Orange-Senqu River Awareness Kit” on DVD provides comprehensive multimedia material on water issues in Southern Africa.
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by Luso on May 16th, 2012
By Jackie May for Times LIVE:
Marian Keyes explains in the introduction to her recipe book, Saved by Cake, how she finds baking calming and rewarding because “it is sort of magic – you start off with all this disparate stuff, like butter and eggs, and what you end up with is so totally different. And also so delicious”.
Two years ago the 48-year-old chick-lit novelist revealed on her blog that she had been battling with a debilitating depression.
“My dear amigos, happy new year to you all and I hope your festive season was not too unpleasant. I’m very sorry but this is going to be a very short piece because I am laid low with crippling depression,” she wrote.
It started in 2009, she says in Saved by Cake.
“I couldn’t sleep; I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t eat; I couldn’t read – by the time I came to the end of a sentence, I’d forgotten the start . I thought a lot about dying.”
There were attempts at available cures. There was the medication, a visit to a psychiatric hospital, (”literally an asylum”), cognitive behavioural therapy, acupuncture, anything she thought might help her. Nothing did.
Until one day she baked a cake. Keyes enjoyed baking the cake so much that she baked another one. And then another.
“I couldn’t stop baking.”
Keyes is very careful not to prescribe baking as a cure to everyone who suffers from depression.
“But it gets me through. My challenge – everyone’s challenge – is about living through the today and I find that baking passes the time. To be perfectly blunt about it, my choice sometimes is: I can kill myself or I can make a dozen cupcakes.”
A result of her therapy is a delightful recipe book with chapters on cupcakes, cheesecakes, meringues and macaroons, chocolate cakes, fruit cakes and favourite classics. There are recipes for every occasion. Her favourite?
Biscuits.
“Making biscuits has given me the most pleasure because I get to use my [many, many] cookie cutters. I get to make my shoes. Edible shoes. And handbags. And owls. And stars. And hearts.”
The recipes are for beginner and experienced bakers and for everybody who loves to see the magical transformation from a little bit of this and a little bit of that into a delicious edible goodie.
Marian Keyes’ Rocky Road Cake
INGREDIENTS
500g rich tea biscuits
300g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)
300g milk chocolate
200g butter
300g golden syrup
100g dried dates, chopped small
100g dried apricots, chopped small
120g hazelnuts, skins off, roasted and chopped roughly
100g mini marshmallows
METHOD
This is a no-bake cake. Easy to make and everyone loves it.
I used ready-roasted hazelnuts with their skins off, but if you prefer to roast your own, place the hazelnuts in a single layer on a baking tray and roast in a 180C (gas 4) oven for five to eight minutes or under the grill for two minutes until browned, checking regularly that they aren’t burning.
To make the cake, begin by lining a 20cm square tin with clingfilm – leaving bits overhanging the sides so you can lift the cake out easily. Break the biscuits into small pieces, smaller than bite-size, but not reduced to crumbs. Melt the chocolate, butter and golden syrup in a large, heat-proof bowl set over a pan of simmering water.
Remove the bowl from the heat and stir in the broken biscuits, then add the dried fruit, nuts and marshmallows.
Stir well, then pour into the prepared tin and refrigerate for six hours.
Lift out of the tin and peel off the clingfilm. Cut into 16 chunks.
Watch people devour.
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by Carolyn on May 15th, 2012
Sonja Loots en Theo Kemp het vanjaar ATKV WOORDtroFEES ontvang vir die informatiewe, verhelderende, diepsinnige en substansiële gesprekke wat hulle tydens die US Woordfees oor hul romans gevoer het.
Loots het met die titel van uitstaande, gevestigde woordkunstenaar weggestap vir haar gesprek oor Sirkusboere, terwyl Kemp as debuutskrywer vir sy bespreking van Skool bekroon is.
Amanda Strydom het die trofee vir kontemporêre musiek vir die produksie Binnekamer gekry. Wessel Pretorius is vir sy eenmanstuk, Ont, in die kategorie vir beste dramaproduksie bekroon. Cape Consort is as die beste klassiekemusiekkunstenaars aangewys en Willem Stydrom is as visuele kunstenaar vereer.
Ivor Fortuin van New Orleans Sekondêr en America van der Merwe van die Hoër Tegniese Skool Proteus is vir hul bydrae tot onderwys met die Woorde Open Wêrelde-toekennings bekroon.
Kyk die KykNET-program Bravo se video van die glansgeleentheid waar die wenners bekendgemaak is en lees die persverklaring:
Persverklaring:
Die ATKV WOORDtroFEES, wat jaarliks toegeken word vir uitnemende aanbiedings op die US Woordfees, is op 3 Mei 2012 tydens ’n spoggerige geleentheid op Bon Esperance buite Stellenbosch toegeken. Dit is die derde keer wat dié spogtoekennings gemaak word.
Twee romansiers het weggestap met die louere as Woordfees 2012 se uitstaande Woordkunstenaars. Sonja Loots, skrywer van Sirkusboere, en Theo Kemp, wat in 2011 gedebuteer het met Skool, is onderskeidelik as gevestigde en debuutskrywer bekroon vir hul feesgesprekke oor hul romans. Verlede jaar het Elsa Joubert en Deborah Steinmair met dié gesogte toekennings weggestap.
Boekbesonderhede
Scribd.com book preview:
Sirkusboere
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by Sophy on May 15th, 2012
By Joanne Fedler for The Times:
I call my children to watch a YouTube video of a father in the US who ends his rant against his teenage daughter’s “I hate my parents” Facebook post, by emptying the barrel of a gun into her laptop.
I suppose I hope it’ll dawn on them that I’m not such a terrible parent for insisting electronics be shut down at 9pm and they each do one chore a week. Instead they look at each other and roll their eyes.
Now that my children are teenagers, the exhausting years of claustrophobic motherhood have been replaced with this: me left feeling a bit silly. They know more than I do about too many things. I need their help with i-Tunes and my i-Phone. They snigger, as if I’m some nerd who’s been under a rock and only just emerged into the daylight of popular culture.
“Don’t come in. I’m filming,” the 12-year-old calls down the passage, like he’s Spielberg or something. I have no idea what’s actually going on in his room, except that later there’ll be Youtube downloads of his “gameplay” which he then insists I watch because it gives him “views”, which is currently how he measures his self-worth.
Parenting teenagers has come upon me suddenly. One day we were in parks, eating ice cream and playing on the slippery dip, and the next my daughter was telling me to “give her a break, she has PMS”, and my son remarking that “roll-on works better, but aerosol is more manly”.
Time Out and Naughty Corners are obsolete and ridiculous. “Eat your broccoli” is usually met with “You eat my broccoli” or “I’ve decided to give up green vegetables”. When I insist, my daughter quotes the Convention on the Rights of the Child. She claims her right to eat what she wants has been recognised by the UN.
I’ve had to update my parenting techniques, like a Facebook status. My children are changing, nightly, by the glow of their computer screens, the click of a mouse, the tweet in the night, and I have to keep up if I want to stay in the game.
My daughter used to love it when people said she looked like me. Now she scowls as if she’s been told she resembled Barney the Dinosaur. When my son sinks a three-pointer, my whoops just embarrass him.
“Be cool, mum. It’s just a basketball game.”
It’s my dignity I miss.
As I search for new meaning in my role as their mum, their need for independence stretches me to breaking point. I have to trust them in the world and the world with them or cripple them with my neurosis. They may be growing up, but I’m having to toughen up, to withstand the shame of having to ask someone a quarter my age what LMFAO means, or what a meme is. Their snappy, cool comebacks make me say puerile things like: “I carried you for nine months of my life. Is it such a big deal to carry two shopping bags to the kitchen?”
They’re preparing me. With closed doors, private conversations and peer secrets, they’re letting me go. They’re shrugging me off like old skin.
Right now I’ll settle for a role in their support team, and not to be defriended by them on Facebook. But I’m slowly expanding my own horizons, and dreaming up that life they keep telling me to get. Who knew of the secret deal between us – that as they grow into themselves, they give me back to myself where I get to watch from the sidelines as they unfurl into funny, opinionated, interesting people I like?
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by Lindsay on May 15th, 2012
Bookboon.com is a London-based company that became the first to focus entirely on free ebooks in 2005. They offer a range of over 1500 eBooks in seven languages for download, and have found success in the South African market with over 200 000 books having been downloaded in the past 12 months.
Bookboon.com are able to make their textbooks free by inserting a small number of “employer branding and recruitment adverts” in the books and are thus challenging a market where eBooks are scarcely cheaper than their print counterparts:
While traditional book publishers are still struggling to find a viable business model for eBooks, Bookboon.com is taking a different approach. With its free digital books it offers an alternative for the often unfairly-priced eBooks.
In South Africa, 200,000 books were downloaded in the last 12 months.
The whole market is in transition, and the traditional publishers are being left behind, since they are not adapting quickly enough to the new market. “We do not understand why eBooks are barely cheaper than paper books when the overhead costs are so much lower. How can publishers explain this to their readers?” asked Kristian Madsen, CEO of bookboon.com.
Press release:
With 500 free textbooks and 250.000 downloads in South Africa publisher challenges established publishers of academic books. By downloading their books South African students can save up to R2100 on books per subject.
Bookboon opens up South Africa
The days of the monopoly of traditional academic book publishers on universities across the country are counted. Where they for a long time could force South African students to buy mandatory literature for high prices, now students have found a free and legal alternative. On Bookboon.com students can download more than 500 free textbooks in Information Technology, Engineering and Finance. This is made possible by including a few employer branding and recruitment adverts in the books.
South African students love Bookboon
“Depending on the subject I can save around R2100 on books per subject. If I would buy them second hand I would save around R400.” Says Samuel Desire Mudzengi, a second year economics student from the University of South Africa (UNISA). In the last 12 months 1 million books were downloaded in Africa of which 200.000 in South Africa.
A chance for disadvantaged students
“Seventy percent of the students downloading in South Africa were previously disadvantaged, and they are now studying at top universities across the country. Our textbooks have made each student’s life a little bit easier, and we will continue to offer more help to more students by providing more free textbooks” says Thomas Buus Madsen, COO of Bookboon.com.
Free but not cheap
“That our books are free does not imply that they are cheap. For us it is very important that the quality of our books meet the high academic standards demanded by universities. To guarantee this all our academic books are written by professors from leading universities worldwide”, explains Buus Madsen.
Growth of 300% in 12 months
Bookboon.com has grown in South Africa with 300% over the last 12 months. “We have experienced this tremendous growth primarily because students feel that our concept is worth sharing with fellow students. Currently we have about 250 textbooks under preparation, so there is a lot more help coming the students way”, says Buus Madsen.
Ends
Image courtesy BusinessTech
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by Luso on May 15th, 2012
Arms deal experts Andrew Feinstein (Shadow World) and Raenette Taljaard (Up in Arms) will join Guy Lamb and Noel Kututwa on Tuesday 15 May in an Amnesty International panel discussion on the global arms trade.
The discussion, entitled “South Africa and the Regulation of the International Arms Trade”, will be held at the University of Cape Town (Lecture Theatre 2A. Leslie Social Sciences Building) from 8 to 10 PM. Don’t miss it!
Event Details
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by Luso on May 15th, 2012
By Keith Miller for The Daily Telegraph:
The first thing to say about John Lanchester is that his journalism explained roughly what was going on when the banking system went south in the late 2000s. Even a humanities graduate had the opportunity to understand what was going on. Lanchester’s was an intelligent, humorous and eminently reasonable voice among all the gibbering.
Capital attempts an allegorical portrait of London during those turbulent times. Squeezing a bafflingly diverse city of more than 70million into even quite a thick book without letting a good portion of the diversity slide is a tall order. But the book is a more or less unimpeachably plausible portrait of one (fictional) street in Clapham, where a spacious but fairly hideous Victorian house can command a price approaching a hundred times the UK’s median annual income.
The denizens of this none too mean street include Roger Yount, a nice-but-dim investment banker and his ghastly wife, Arabella; a newsagent, Ahmed Kamal, and Rohinka, “his delicious one”; a Senegalese footballing prodigy; and the octogenarian Petunia Howe, the only aboriginal resident, contemplating death in the house in which she was born.
The richer inhabitants attract the professional attentions of, variously, a lawyer, a Polish builder, a squadron of childcare workers and a Zimbabwean traffic warden. They also have the normal human appurtenances in the way of families, friends, colleagues, lovers etc.
From the outset, there is trouble in Paradise. A scene-setting prologue renders the houses in the street as old gods from an HP Lovecraft horror story, sucking the life out of generations of Londoners, throbbing with malign intent. Then we zoom abruptly down to the humans within. It is almost Christmas 2007.
Gently, slowly, Lanchester tightens the screws, alternating hope and despair, flitting between protagonists neatly and dexterously.
There is a reticence, an austerity about the book that I very much liked. The obvious-seeming parallels with Charles Dickens should not be inked in too heavily.
A more credible parallel is with Honoré de Balzac: like Balzac, Lanchester has the brains to relate the particular to the general; the ruthlessness to make bad things happen to good people; the steadiness of hand to draw unpalatable conclusions and, crucially, the courage to bore his readers a little, at times, rather than leave them under-informed.
This impulse to inform also tends to inoculate Lanchester from the realist writer’s urge to moralise. Yet some of the book’s “lessons” seem a shade limited, limiting, even.
This is not, of course, the first large book to be so entitled. But Lanchester is not really doing “analysis” in the Marxist sense.
The noises we hear emanating from the world of money are not directly responsible for the bad things that happen to our characters; they are the result of personal wickedness, arcane coincidence, institutional stupidity (the book is at its most overtly political in its treatment of the post-9/11 criminal justice system) or, realistically enough, dumb luck.
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by Luso on May 15th, 2012
By Aubrey Paton for The Times:
The Secret Chamber continues the misadventures of climber Lucca Matthews, hero of Woodhead’s The Cloud Maker.
The Secret Chamber, by Patrick Woodhead, Arrow, R119
Affected by the death of a friend, Lucca has lost his climbing nerve and works as a porter in the Himalayas until he is forced back into reality by a distress call from his godfather, sending him off to Africa in search of a childhood companion.
In the Congo’s Ituri Forest he meets his love interest, “Bear” Makuru, the half-French mining expert and pilot who is investigating explosions in the Coltan mines.
Cliches abound as our couple encounter “half-witted Boers” and evil Chinamen, youthful psychopaths from the Lord’s Resistance Army and despotic monomaniacs, with pimps, mercenaries, mysterious minerals and Rooivalk helicopters thrown in for good measure.
Many details are laughably incorrect. Yet, despite sloppy editing, sexism and racism, the story is gripping. The Secret Chamber is a book I hated to love but have to recommend to lovers of fast-paced and thought-provoking action.
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by Lindsay on May 15th, 2012
By Andrew Donaldson for The Times:
Short, sharp guidance and observations from a journalist with attitude.
IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, by Jon Ronson (Picador) R120
There’s an intriguing question at the heart of this engrossing, hilarious investigation: what if society was not fundamentally rational, but was motivated by insanity?
Ronson trips, one anxiety attack after another, through the world of psychopaths and their therapists and uncovers some hard truths along the way.
THE ISSUE
Among the recently published biographies and memoirs is this gem, Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of WT Stead, Britain’s First Investigative Journalist, by W Sydney Robinson (Robson Press).
Stead died in the Titanic disaster, but before then he’d raised – or lowered – the bar when it came to tabloid reporting, and enjoyed a notorious reputation in Victorian society as both a Puritan and a sex-fanatic who dabbled, with equal measure, in social reform and the occult.
Your basic newspaper editor, in other words. He first shot to fame when he “purchased” a 13-year-old girl from her drunk mother and installed her in a brothel as part of a campaign against child prostitution. The story sold newspapers – but it also got Stead a prison term, for procurement.
CRASH COURSE
Genre writers are under the whip. The New York Times recently reported that “the e-book age has accelerated the metabolism of book publishing” and authors who were once regarded as productive if they released a new book annually “are now pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year”.
Thriller writer Lee Child, for example, is now supplementing his Jack Reacher books with short stories available only in digital format.
He’s not alone.
Publishers claim that such stories, carefully released before major new releases, could entice readers willing to pay about R10 for a download into later parting with major tom for a new hardcover.
Incidentally, a colleague has complained he can’t find some of the titles mentioned in this column in book stores. Personally, I think it says a lot about where and how he shops. He refuses to order them – “Elmore Leonard? How do you spell that?” was the sort of response he got when he last tried – and he refuses to buy them online.
And he won’t buy a digital reader – so he’s not going to download them. “I like to browse in shops,” he explained, defensively.
Well, take your time, buddy. Take your time.
THE BOTTOM LINE
“‘Gentlemen,’ he earnestly explained, ‘you have a problem. You have a nigger on your hands.’” Preachin’ the Blues: The Life & Times of Son House, by Daniel Beaumont (Oxford University Press)
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by Lindsay on May 15th, 2012
AFP Relaxnews:
Amazon said it has signed a deal for the electronic books rights to all seven Harry Potter titles English, French, Italian, German and Spanish for its Kindle lending library.
The deal allows subscribers of the Amazon Prime service, which requires an annual subscription, to borrow the electronic versions of best-selling JK Rowling books.
Amazon said it inked the exclusive license with JK Rowling’s Pottermore website to make the titles available to its customers via the Kindle e-reader.
But the deal only allows for borrowing of the ebooks, with Pottermore remaining the only place to buy the electronic versions.
“We’re absolutely delighted to have reached this agreement with Pottermore. This is the kind of significant investment in the Kindle ecosystem that we’ll continue to make on behalf of Kindle owners,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive.
“Over a year, borrowing the Harry Potter books, plus a handful of additional titles, can alone be worth more than the $79 cost of Prime or a Kindle. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library also has an innovative feature that’s of great benefit for popular titles like Harry Potter – unlimited supply of each title – you never get put on a waiting list.”
The Amazon lending library has now grown to over 145 000 books that can be borrowed for free as frequently as once a month, with no due dates.
Books are borrowed to read on a Kindle device, and customers can have one book out at a time. When customers want to borrow a new book, any borrowed book can be returned from their device.
Rowling laid down her pen – and Harry’s magic wand – when she finished the seventh and final Potter book in 2007, and since then the series has sold more than 450 million copies around the world in 74 languages.
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