Archive for the ‘Non-fiction’ Category
by Maggie Marx on Jun 18th, 2013
Uitspraak: wortel
Johan Badenhorst, aanbieder en vervaardiger van die gewilde Voetspore-reeks, se dagboek van hulle reis gedurende 2012 op die Afrika-vasteland is ’n luilekker rusbank-reisgeleentheid vir ieder en elk. Van die voorwoord af, waar ’n kykie agter die skerms van die beplanning van ’n Voetspore-reis gegee word, tot die naskrif, waar Johan bespiegel oor moontlike toekomstige reise, sal die leser voel dat hy saam met die ses Voetspore-manne in die Volkswagen Amaroks deur Afrika reis.
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by Maggie Marx on Jun 18th, 2013
Uitspraak: wortel
In die titel van sy biografie oor Vladimir Tretchikoff, Incredible Tretchikoff, gee Boris Gorelik reeds ’n aanduiding van verwondering, maar eweneens oorbluftheid.
Wat Gorelik beplan het om te doen, en genadiglik nie daarvan afwyk nie, is om ’n verkenning te gee van die lewe en werk van dié skilder wat in 1913 in Kazachstan gebore en in 2006 in Kaapstad dood is.
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by Lindsay on Jun 18th, 2013
By Antony Altbeker for the Sunday Times Lifestyle Magazine
Antony Altbeker speaks to Redi Tlhabi, a finalist in the Alan Paton Awards, about her memoir of growing up in Soweto
Redi Tlhabi is a journalist who hosts a talkshow on Radio 702 and a programme on Al Jazeera English. Endings and Beginnings: A Story of Healing is her first book.
South Africa’s appalling levels of gender violence and the vulnerability of young girls are at the heart of your story. But it is also incredibly intimate and personal. Why did you write it?
Really, I had no idea that I was writing a book. When I began the project, all I intended was to revisit a chapter in my life that I really wanted to understand. I needed to find a way to come to terms with what had happened because I was haunted by it. In fact, the publishers had to persuade me that this was worth publishing. But the fact that the world is still so hostile to women, to young girls and to the poor persuaded me that I should share my story.
You make the streets of Orlando East seem terrifying, especially for girls.
They were scary. But the most troubling thing is that at the time I didn’t think of them as dangerous. The constant harassment, the threats of rape and jackrolling: all of it seemed so normal. I was uncomfortable a lot of the time, but on some level I didn’t think of what was going on as wrong. And that is the real tragedy. Girls were expected to just accept their fate, that they would be attacked and that they would get no sympathy. I could only see how kids were robbed of their childhoods after I left Orlando.
Why was Orlando like that?
I don’t know. If you were involved in a physical fight with another child or throwing stones, adults would intervene. But when young men would torment girls on the streets or grab them for jackrolling, then everyone was paralysed. Of course, the context matters. There was so much unemployment and political violence. So some people may have thought that there were bigger problems to deal with. I think if someone had started to scream their lungs out, lots of people would have joined in. But that never happened.
Mabegzo was one of the most notorious jackrollers, yet he treated you like an angel. Why?
That’s what I was trying to make sense of in writing the book. I’ve always assumed that part of it was that he sensed my brokenness over my father’s death. But it may also have something to do with how I treated him. Everyone was terrified of him and would run away from him. And I think he generally enjoyed that. But I was the one person who reacted differently, though that was mostly because I didn’t know who he was when I met him. I had heard of Mabegzo, but he didn’t look anything like I thought he would look. He was clean and handsome. He didn’t walk the way the bullies in the street walked. He wore proper shoes, not All Stars. So when I met him, I didn’t know who he was and I was unafraid. I was curious and maybe a little attracted: I looked him in the eye and talked normally, like to any other person.
There was a big age gap between you. Wasn’t that a little strange?
My attraction to older men started with Mabegzo and it persists to this day with my husband. I probably needed a father figure. After my father’s murder, I had become extremely serious about life. The giggles of other children, really, they just got on my nerves. For me, life was serious, almost suffocating. I tended to avoid people of my own age.
While writing the book, you discovered Mabegzo had murdered Siphiwe to stop him from raping you. How did that make you feel?
Even at the time I suspected Mabegzo had something to do with it. So my story is also about Siphiwe and what happened to him, and about how I feel responsible for his death. But it was years later that I confirmed that Mabegzo had killed Siphiwe. When I heard that, it made me physically sick and threw me into a deep depression. After all those years I suddenly understood that I had caused a lot of sh*t for him and his family. I was filled with self-loathing.
But you knew it was not your fault.
Yes, but I was revolted by Mabegzo. Any consideration he had shown me paled into insignificance compared to what he had done to Siphiwe. Whatever Siphiwe was saying and doing, Mabegzo would have known that I would think killing was vile. If he really cared for me, he should have treated that part of me with respect. So I felt betrayed. But I also felt guilty, not just because of the death, but because of the relief I felt when Siphiwe died. The fact that I felt this was good riddance. My feelings were very complex.
Mabegzo’s mother, Imelda, is at the heart of the book. Her message is that sometimes it’s better not to reconcile and forgive.
Beautiful Imelda. She is my hero. She has had more of an impact on me than Mabegzo. Her victory is the life she manages to lead even after all the pain she suffered.
At some point during our conversations, I had to stop trying to make her forgive her mother; to stop forcing her story to be one of reconciliation and happy endings. I was desperate that she give up her bitterness towards her mother. I thought this was tainting her. But actually the right way to say it is that she had the strength to allow herself never to forgive. So this is not a perfect ending with everyone kissing and making up. Her choice was to live or die and she chose to live.
Do you judge Imelda’s mother as harshly as Imelda does?
In their feedback, my readers have been really hard on Nkgono. But what she did was common – when girls got pregnant, their mothers would send them to the rural areas to be raised by their grandmothers. Even when the pregnancy was not the result of a rape. And Nkgono’s initial reaction was not to send Imelda away; she did so only after the community began to gossip about Imelda and her pregnancy. But Imelda hates it when I talk in a way that suggests that Nkgono did what she did to protect her. She won’t accept that.
Nkgono’s big mistake – the one that Imelda cannot forgive and maybe we should not forgive – is that, having sent Imelda away, she decided to raise Mabegzo herself and to separate Imelda and Mabegzo forever. Only Nkgono can really explain that, but she never did: she just did what she believed was God’s will.
- Endings and Beginnings is published by Jacana
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by Carolyn on Jun 18th, 2013
By Andrea Nagel for The Times
Polar bears swim the icy waters of the North and South poles all the time, but they have 10cm of blubber and thick fur to keep them insulated. Lewis Pugh has only a swimming cap, a Speedo and his superhuman determination. He has based his career on setting himself extraordinarily high-risk goals with a high pain factor for which you need a bionic body.
Luckily, despite some people believing that many of his swimming expeditions, including the most northerly and southerly long-distance swims in the world, were impossible, Pugh has never lost so much as a digit.
In his latest book, 21 Yaks and a Speedo: How to achieve your impossible, Pugh distils his experiences into bite-sized chapters, each with its own motivational message.
Vasbyt is the message of one of these chapters.
“Whenever I thought of quitting, I would just ask myself a simple question: ‘Lewis, can you take just one more step?’ If the answer was ‘yes’, then I’d take it,” he writes.
“In writing this book, I wanted to tell short, pithy stories that can be read in five minutes,” he says. “The idea was to take my experiences in some of the most remote parts of the world and to relate them to everyday situations which all of us face to illustrate the everyday concepts of team work, courage, hope and, of course, vasbyt.”
One chapter tells the story of Pugh’s mission to swim across the Maldives archipelago to highlight the effect of global warming on the country.
Halfway through the 13-day swim, the team boat breaks down and they are forced to make a plan or turn back. The thing that comes across clearly when reading the book, and talking with the man, is that Pugh is not a quitter.
In the distance his team manager, Major General Tim Toyne Sewell, sees a yacht he believes belongs to Chelsea soccer club owner Roman Abramovich. After a call by “The General” to the club’s former manager, Jose Mourinho, and much to the consternation of Pugh, the team find themselves on the yacht. Pugh is disappointed that he hadn’t believed that all it would take was asking for help to get it.
The message of the chapter? “When we limit our beliefs about what is possible, we don’t ask for help. We’re not even out of the stable and we’ve already given up the race.”
This kind of humility is uncharacteristic of Pugh, but then he is a man who has achieved remarkable things, and he consequently has plenty to teach us ordinary folk.
When he’s not planning an expedition or not undertaking world-saving ecological projects, his time is taken up by motivational speaking.
The book is all pretty rah rah, blow your trumpet stuff, but it’s impossible not to get drawn in to the magnitude of Pugh’s achievements. He manages to achieve the telling of his stories and the morals that go with them with impressive aplomb, pretty much like everything he does.
- 21 Yaks and a Speedo is published by Jonathan Ball
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by Maggie Marx on Jun 18th, 2013
Verdict: carrot
THIS book was written by a mother, Kate Shand, who is coming to terms with the loss of her son, who unexpectedly committed suicide.
It is a very sad tale of how John Peter (Boy) decided to end his life after he had gone for a random drug test.
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by Ben - Editor on Jun 16th, 2013
The New York-based publishing company Melville House has scored a critical hit with its latest book, Cotton Tenants. The work was created from an unpublished manuscript of Jame Agee’s, discovered in the writer’s archives at the University of Tennesee. Agee’s writing is accompanied by photographs from Walker Evans: the two worked their way together across the landscape of America’s Great Depression, documenting the devastation wreaked by poverty on human lives.
The scenes in Cotton Tenants, stripped of their historical and geographical markers, might have been written today, by writers visiting any number of places around the world – though it’s doubtful how many would achieve Agee’s spare intensity in their reportage:
Nobody escapes malaria and its returns; and in its milder forms, such as diarrhea, nausea, headache, dizziness, sudden departures of strength, and retching of bile, everyone takes it for granted. Every so often, though, you get such a bad spell of it you mighty nigh have to quit work. Soda and Calotabs are the common remedies. The Tingles like this one, to begin a meal: a pinch of Epsom salts three times a day for nine days; skip nine days; resume; go on until relieved. About a pound generally fixes you up.
Or if you are constituted luckily, the various poisons with which your system is loaded will assemble themselves into the safety valves locally known as risings and more widely known as boils. After a while, the valve blows off. That is the signal for another rising.
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by Maggie Marx on Jun 14th, 2013
Verdict: carrot
THIS is a book about 12 remarkable women who helped many soldiers and children with their skills as nurses or teachers in the Anglo-Boer War, from 1899 to 1902.
Motivated by a sense of adventure and patriotism or inspired by the tales of Florence Nightingale, these women from New Zealand, Canada, Australia, England, Holland, Belgium and Sweden courageously set off to a country at war, withlittle idea of what to expect.
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by Maggie Marx on Jun 14th, 2013
Verdict: carrot
MOST people, faced with the task of writing a social history of concentration camps, let alone those in which at least 26,000 mainly women and children Afrikaners died, would shudder and shy away from such an emotive and divisive topic. It helps to explain why, for half a century, little has emerged from the extensive archival records on the camps that were released in SA in the 1950s.
But now Elizabeth van Heyningen, who was a history lecturer and researcher at the University of Cape Town for many years, has bravely stepped up to the plate. It helps that her decades-long research, and the subject matter of two books she co-authored, have been concerned with the social history of medicine and the history of colonial women. In addition, she conducted research for a project, funded by the Wellcome Trust (a global charitable health foundation) on the medical history of the camps.
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by Lindsay on Jun 13th, 2013
FEMRITE, Uganda Women Writers’ Association, has helped to create a new generation of female writers in Uganda, writes Elizabeth Day for The Observer.
Day spoke to Doreen Baingana, co-facilitator of the 4th FEMRITE Regional Women Writers’ Residence along with Zukiswa Wanner this year, who refers to FEMRITE as her “literary home”. Baingana, whose book Tropical Fish won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers prize for best debut, commented that “we expect the African story to be one of tragedy and despair and how people overcame suffering…In fact, there are other stories”.
Day writes that, “The act of putting words on a page, of telling the truth through fiction, is a brave one for women in Uganda”. In 2009 FEMRITE travelled through Uganda collecting stories of women who had been circumcised and compiling them in the anthology Beyond the Dance. FEMRITE volunteer Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva spoke about women holding back from telling their stories, “In the villages, they feel it’s a form of betrayal to express themselves because they’re so used to silence, to just nodding without argument”. Nsengiyunva commented on the article in The Observer, saying that she was glad to have been interviewed for it but that she “wanted to add that not all is dire amongst Ugandan writers”.
Beatrice Lamwaka was not yet a teenager when her 13-year-old brother, Richard, was abducted as a child soldier. The family lived in Alokolum, a town in northern Uganda, an area riven by civil war and brutal uprisings since the late 1980s, and Richard was snatched by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a militia group under the fanatical control of the murderous Joseph Kony. Under Kony’s rule, child soldiers such as Richard were given automatic weapons and trained to kill. They were forced to commit atrocities against their friends and siblings. Those who attempted to escape were murdered.
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by Maggie Marx on Jun 13th, 2013
Uitspraak: wortel
Ná nege jaar van swye nooi Melanie Grobler die leser uit op ’n digterlike avontuur deur ruite van die reis. Ruit roep sekere assosiasies op: skerm, be-skerm, insig en uit-sig, binne en buite, vaag en helder, nabyheid en afstand.
In die reis is daar beweging (vorentoe en agtertoe), soms stilstand, meditasie en waarneming. Die pragtige omslag is ’n visuele uitdrukking van die gedigte.
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Download this eBook at LittleWhiteBakkie.com
Download this eBook at LittleWhiteBakkie.com
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