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/ 6 November 2007
In 1974, Ronan Bennett, an 18-year-old Irish republican revolutionary, was wrongly convicted of murdering a Royal Ulster Constabulary officer and spent 18 months in Long Kesh prison (later renamed the Maze). He has told the story of his arrest and imprisonment many times, and doesn’t like to go over it again.
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/ 6 November 2007
JM Coetzee’s latest protagonist is none other than JM Coetzee, in a disguise constructed to fool no one. But Coetzee is far too clever to become his own hero — the simulation serves complex functions, not all of which are yet apparent. He uses an artifice that serves his purpose better than if he simply delivered his opinions about the world as it was and as it has become, writes Yunus Momoniat.
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/ 6 November 2007
Every province deserves one, but thus far only Mpumalanga is so blessed. Deeply researched, written and edited with admirable clarity, and attractively presented, Mpumalanga: History and Heritage (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press) is the <i>Mail & Guardian</i>’s choice for non-fiction book of the year, writes Darryl Accone.
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/ 6 November 2007
The MD of Struik, Steve Connelly, was quoted by Celean Jacobs in her very
interesting article (No woman, no cry, Sunday Times, June 11 2006) as
saying that their new imprint of Oshun, "wanted to access the book-club market, which is mainly women". And, he continued, "… trying to create an environment where authors who happen to be women are writing for readers who largely happen to be women".
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/ 6 November 2007
"Crime writing sells all over the world," says Jill van Zyl, a director of Exclusive Books, South Africa’s largest book retailer. "International crime writers sell very well in South Africa. From a bookseller’s point of view, you can compare crime writing with cookery books. People buy cookbooks in great numbers and yet everybody goes out for dinner!
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/ 6 November 2007
Until the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the post-colonial world had never witnessed, in terms of primitive brutality, a tragedy in which a million people (Tutsis) were killed in just 12 weeks by their foes (Hutus). Yet, a lesser known, equally harrowing war took place between 1967 and 1970 following the decision by Nigeria’s south-eastern region to secede from the federal state.
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/ 6 November 2007
Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neoliberal cult of the free market.
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/ 6 November 2007
No matter how complete our idea of a person or an event might be, it is always adulterated by our own subjectivity. A multitude of individual nuances accompanies each of our understandings, despite the desire to try to explain things as truthfully and adeptly as we can. This idea is at the core of Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel, <i>Divisadero</i> (Bloomsbury).
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/ 6 November 2007
As a teenager I found a book by Elizabeth Hand called the Aestival Tide. It was a bizarre and terrifying vision of the future, blighted by nuclear disaster and man’s own monstrosity; a book that I couldn’t forget although I never found anything else by Hand … until now that is, writes Lynley Donnelly.
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/ 6 November 2007
Given how little we know about William Shakespeare’s life, an awful lot has been written on the subject. Of course the plays and poems produce a seemingly endless amount of commentary and interpretation and reinterpretation, but the hard facts of his life are few and far between. As Bill Bryson writes: ”Shakespeare, it seems, is not so much a historical figure as an Âacademic obsession.”