The three recent accounts of state capture and corruption should be at the top of a serious South African’s list of books to read; we reviewed them here.
And then there are the top-selling titles of the moment, with Faf du Plessis’s Faf: Through Fire obviously having a great appeal for sports-lovers.
But there are more. Many more.
If you’re interested in how we got from the socialist-inclined ANC’s return home to the vast enrichment of a few ANC-linked businesspeople, read Pieter du Toit’s masterful and very readable account in The ANC Billionaires: Big Capital’s Gambit and the Rise of the Few (Jonathan Ball).
If you’re interested in how international crime cartels have encircled this country, read Caryn Dolley’s Clash of the Cartels: Unmasking the Global Drug Kingpins Stalking South Africa (Maverick451). This is an extraordinary story with many strands, encompassing the world from Afghanistan to Australia and Serbia to Columbia, and it’s still playing out.
Those concerned about the climate crisis, as we all should be, could take a look at Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future by Philip Lymbery (Bloomsbury). Lymbery, the author of Farmageddon and Dead Zone, catalogues the horrors that await humanity as the plant warms up uncontrollably, but also offers solutions and remedies.
The big picture, economically and politically speaking, is laid out in Age of Menace: Capitalism, Inequality and the Battle for Dignity (Mercury) by David Buckham, Robyn Wilkinson and Christiaan Straeuli, the authors of last year’s The End of Money. Bruce Whitfield said of Age of Menace: "21-century capitalism and the democracies that enabled it are self-destructing. This book is a sobering – and impeccably researched – warning of what is likely to come next."
Part of what Buckham et al write about is the rise of anti-democratic forces, which would include the US’s attempted insurrectionists who invaded the Capitol on 6 January 2021. The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th (Macmillan) is a fascinating account of how their plots were uncovered after the fact. Author Denver Riggleman was a key investigator for the House Select Committee probing the riot – and is himself a former Republican congressman. His story is inflected by his conservative family’s rejection of his work, showing how the US right simply denies reality, and giving his story a sad personal touch.
Elsewhere in the US criminal-justice system, a woman was going on trial for procuring under-age girls for a powerful financier. That was Ghislaine Maxwell, who procured and groomed young women for Jeffrey Epstein, and veteran British journalist John Sweeney tells the tale in Hunting Ghislaine (Hodder & Stoughton) – not just that of tracking down Maxwell after Epstein’s arrest and death, but the fuller story of Epstein, the girls and women (103 of them deposed affidavits detailing his and Maxwell’s manipulations), and the famous figures associated with him, including Donald Trump and the then Duke of York. Sweeney’s style is rather tabloidy, so you may be left feeling slightly soiled by reading this book, but it’s undeniably gripping.
Delving into nearly forgotten history won this year’s Sunday Times Award for Non-Fiction for Mignonne Breier, whose Bloody Sunday: The Nun, the Defiance Campaign and South Africa’s Secret Massacre (Tafelberg) is a beautifully written and constructed account of horrifying events. In 1952, in Duncan Village, East London, police went on a shooting spree in response to anti-apartheid resistance; in the mayhem, Sister Aidan Quinlan, an Irish nun working as a doctor in the area, was killed. Breier reconstructs what happened, and paints a moving portrait of this remarkable woman.
Al J Venter is someone who witnessed much history as it happened across Africa, working as he did as a war correspondent for 55 years. His memoir, Takka Takka Bom Bom: A South African War Correspondent’s Story (Tafelberg) is replete with scary, sometimes funny, always entertaining stories set in some of the world’s darkest places. (Spoiler: Venter survives.)
Going back further into African colonial history, Bryan Rostron takes a personal and familial view in Lost on the Map: A Memoir of Colonial Illusions (BookStorm). “For over 250 years,” he writes, “my family went forth and colonised.” Rostron traces these imperial journeys across Africa and elsewhere (it starts in Tahiti in 1767) and the personalities involved. One grandfather of his was a racist newspaper editor; another worked for the Communist Party and produced revolutionary pamphlets. It’s a fascinating book.
More history is to be found in Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) by Antony Beevor, the acclaimed historian of World War II and the Spanish Civil War. It’s a very full account, with much detail that hasn’t perhaps been considered until now – “a masterpiece of historical imagination”, as John Gray calls it.
As for biographies, Lucy Worsley’s Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman (Hodder & Stoughton) is surely going to be honoured when the year’s prizes are rolled out in late 2023. It’s a sterling work on the woman who could still be the world’s biggest-selling writer, a woman who concealed her self-emancipation behind a screen of conventionality and conservatism. Worsley gives a plausible psychological reading of Christie’s famous disappearance in 1929, and tracks this remarkable woman’s life and career to the end.
An autobiography surely worth investigating is that of Juby Mayet, a remarkable figure who, from the 1950s onwards, did a lot of what women were supposed to leave to men. Her story, which she was working on at the time of her death, has been completed and published as Freedom Writer: My Life and Times (Jacana). She discusses growing up in Fietas, dealing with marriage and a chaotic family life, and competing with the guys when it came to writing for Drum. Always unconventional, Mayet could, it’s said, also drink Drum writers such as Can Themba under the table.
Film fans will find much to chew on in director Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation (Weidenfeld & Nicholson), a take on cinema and his favourite films by “possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive”. From cop thrillers such as Bullitt to horror movies such as The Funhouse (by Tobe Hooper, auteur of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which Tarantino describes as “one of the few perfect movies ever made” but, perversely, doesn’t examine), Tarantino indulges his over-fondness for italics but always has something interesting to say.