by Luso on 22 May 2012
Verdict: carrot
A lyrical, boundlessly imaginative young adult fantasy novel that will have you falling in complete and utter hedonistic book love. There are so many misconceptions about Cat Hellisen’s When the Sea is Rising Red. It’s been labelled as being everything from historical fiction and romance, to paranormal and even, get this, dystopian fiction. All of which it is not.
What the book is, is a masterfully told and beautifully written fantasy novel that even fights against the strains of the very genre it is defined by. It’s a novel of magic and mayhem. It’s a book world that is filled with a wondrous kind of wind-swept beauty, starkly juxtaposed by the divisive lines between the rich and the poor.
In short? It’s a book that every fantasy lover should read and it’s also a novel that surprised me on so many different levels, in so many different ways.
Book Details
by Lindsay on 22 May 2012
By Andrew Donaldson for The Times:
Short, sharp guidance and observations from a journalist with attitude.
IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK…
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller (Simon & Schuster) R120
Shortly out in cheaper paperback, Fuller’s prequel to her acclaimed debut, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, reintroduces us to her glamorous, tragic mother as she explores her parents’ boozy colonial dream. Unsparingly funny.
THE ISSUE
University of Cape Town philosophy professor David Benatar argues in his new book, The Second Sexism (John Wiley & Sons), that men are routinely discriminated against in ways that women are not. “It’s a neglected form of sexism,” Benatar told The Observer recently. “It’s true that in the developed world the majority of economic and political roles are occupied by males. But if you look at the bottom – for example, the prison population, the homeless population, or the number of people dropping out of school – that is overwhelmingly male. You tend to find more men at the very top but also at the very bottom.”
The book has attracted a predictable response from the usual quarters; The Guardian‘s Suzanne Moore, for example, has dismissed Benatar’s concerns as “victim-envy”.
“Are men the new women?” she wrote. “Are they having a harder time than silly moaning ladies? Has feminism gone too far? Has political correctness been put away for its own good? These are such familiar cultural tropes that we may dismiss the word trope altogether. Instead, I would use another word: tripe.”
Benatar responded that Moore was missing the point: “I specifically noted that I do not deny that women are the victims of sexism. My argument is that men also are.
“She also claims that I blur ‘the difference between disadvantage and discrimination’. In fact, I specifically distinguished disadvantage from discrimination and noted that to make my argument I would need to show not merely that men are disadvantaged but that this is also the product of discrimination.”
Academics have praised Benatar’s work. Daphne Patai, critic, author and languages, literature and culture professor at the University of Massachusetts, noted that his “well argued and thoughtful book makes a compelling case for taking seriously men’s hidden injuries if we are to genuinely build a better world”.
CRASH COURSE
With reference to Brett Murray’s The Spear, a thought from Salman Rushdie: “[Art] can be shocking, or ugly, or, to use the catch-all term so beloved of the tabloid press, controversial. And if we believe in liberty, if we want the air we breathe to remain plentiful and breathable, this is the art whose right to exist we must not only defend, but celebrate. Art is not entertainment. At its very best, it’s a revolution.”
THE BOTTOM LINE
“The oceans have changed more in the last 30 years than in all of history before.” – Ocean of Life: How Our Seas Are Changing by Callum Roberts (Allen Lane)
Books brought to you in association with Exclusives.co.za
by Luso on 22 May 2012
By Julia Beffon for The Times:
Dead Men Risen by Toby Harnden
The British Ministry of Defence tried to prevent people reading this gritty report of the Welsh Guards’ 2009 six-month tour of Afghanistan, going as far as to obtain thousands of copies and have them pulped. Fortunately, Harnden and his publishers fought to allow it to be read.
Dead Men Risen shows how politicians and those high up in the armed forces put their own troops in a fight they could not win – or even survive – by not providing enough equipment or support, and by believing that the British soldier would somehow win because he is inherently superior to his opponent.
This combination of stupid pride and half-hearted funding resulted in a well-trained but tragically under-resourced group. Harnden catalogues the ensuing tragedy superbly. He relates how the Welsh guards are allowed to die because they do not have enough helicopters, how their 300 fighting men are expected to hold vast areas, and how they are blown to smithereens to gain pitifully small stretches of countryside only to be moved a few weeks later, handing that territory right back to the enemy.
It is heartbreaking to get to know the soldiers and see their smiling photos, and to know they did not die protecting anything worthwhile at all.
Books brought to you in association with Exclusives.co.za
by Lindsay on 21 May 2012
Alert! Earlier today we learnt (from Lauren Beukes on Twitter) the exciting news that speculative fiction writer Charlie Human has landed a two-book deal with Century, a UK-based imprint of Random House.
Century will publish Human’s first book, Apocalypse Now Now, in 2013 and has pre-empted the completion of the author’s second book, as yet untitled, in the same deal.
Back home, the South African rights for Apocalypse Now Now were sold to Random House Struik Umuzi’s imprint. Congratulations to Human!
Century has pre-empted two books by South African author Charlie Human, likening his writing to Neil Gaiman, China Mieville and Terry Pratchett.
Editorial director Jack Fogg bought UK and Commonwealth rights to Apocalypse Now Now and as yet untitled second book from John Berlyne at the Zeno agency. Random House Struik bought South African rights in a separate deal.
by Claire on 21 May 2012
Colonel Gadaffi’s Hat is both a gripping and deeply moving account of the Libyan uprising from the lone journalist who was able to report from the rebel army convoy that captured Green Square, in the heart of Tripoli.
Alex Crawford’s daring reports were beamed across news networks from around the globe, and against a dramatic backdrop of celebratory gunfire, Alex and her team showed the world the final symbolic moments of the fall of a regime that had held power for more than 40 years.
The euphoria and chaos of that atmosphere of jubilation was soon overcome by the realities of conflict, and the story of the following days that Alex so viscerally tells in this remarkable account is an eye-opening journey full of human stories that are both shocking and touching.
A portrait of the last gasps of Gaddafi’s regime, Crawford’s book is an extraordinary insight into modern political conflict and the nature of journalism. The first journalist to be on the scene at a number of key points in the Libyan conflict, Alex has been arrested, shot at, tear gassed and interrogated in the course of her career, and paints a fascinating picture of war journalism.
A heart-stopping ride through a dramatic moment in modern history, Colonel Gadaffi’s Hat is a window into both the craft of journalism and the amazing story of Libya’s road to Freedom.
About the author
Alex Crawford was brought up in Nigeria and Zambia, and started her journalism career at the Wokingham Times, before moving to the BBC, and eventually Sky News. She is the Sky News Special Correspondent covering the Gulf and the Middle East. She is the only journalist to have won the Royal Television Society’s Journalist of the Year Award three times, and was recently awarded the prestigious James Cameron Memorial Award in recognition of her outstanding contribution to journalism. Alex lives in Johannesburg with her husband and four daughters.
Book details
by Lindsay on 20 May 2012
Romanian-born German novelist Herta Müller, best known for her 1994 novel The Land of Green Plums, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature for her writings on the disposessed.
In her latest book, The Hunger Angel, translated from the German by Philip Boehm, Müller moves away from a subject that has so far dominated her work – life in Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu. The Hunger Angel focus on a trauma experienced by her parents’ generation, the deportation of thousands of German Romanians to Soviet Union labour camps during World War Two.
Read an extract from the opening of The Hunger Angel, courtesy NPR:
On Packing Suitcases
All that I have I carry on me.
Or: All that is mine I carry with me.
I carried all I had, but it wasn’t mine. Everything either came from someone else or wasn’t what it was supposed to be. A gramophone box served as a pigskin suitcase. The light overcoat came from my father. The fancy coat with the velvet collar from my grandfather. The knickers from Uncle Edwin. The leather gaiters came from our neighbor Herr Carp, the green woolen gloves from Aunt Fini. Only the burgundy silk scarf and the toilet kit belonged to me, presents from the previous Christmas.
Alan Cheuse reviews The Hunger Angel:
For the sake of full disclosure, I’ll tell you that I had not read Herta Muller for a number of reasons before the appearance of Nadirs, her brilliant collection of short takes about a family of German-speakers living in the Romanian countryside. I don’t know that I would have picked it up if Muller, a Romanian-born writer who works in German, had not won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009. I can tell you I was pretty happy that I did. Nadirs was — is — a terrific work of short fiction, showing off Muller’s powers as a world-class creator of fiction driven by visionary power. I was ready when her latest novel, The Hunger Angel, arrived in the mail. It’s a latecomer to the crowd of books written about internment during World War II — doubly so, because the war ends when the internment of the main character begins.
Larry Rohter speaks to Herta Muller for The New York Times:
As a child growing up in a tiny, German-speaking village in Romania, on the edge of Transylvania, Herta Müller was assigned chores that included herding cows. Out in the pastures with little to do, she amused herself by giving names and personalities to the flowers she collected and the clouds that drifted by, or imagined a future as a seamstress, like her aunt, or perhaps as a hairdresser.
But a career as a writer, much less one who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature? She could not imagine such a thing, living as she did in linguistic isolation and under surveillance as part of a suspect German minority under the drab Communist dictatorship that came to be ruled by the megalomaniacal Nicolae Ceausescu.
Book details
Photo courtesy The New York Times
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