Conflicts facing an embedded military journalist in the Gulf

Review: Archie Henderson

In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat, by Rick Atkinson (Henry Holt & Co New York)

Rick Atkinson is no stranger to the military. The son of an infantry officer, he grew up an army brat and after entering journalism, he took time off from his day job to write the first of his World War 2 trilogy, An Army at Dawn, to be followed by The Day of Battle and The Guns at Last Light.

These tracked, with meticulous and engaging historiography, American involvement in that conflict.

So when the US military opened its ranks to “embedded” journalists for the idiocy of the second Gulf War in 2003, Atkinson’s employers, the Washington Post, decided he would be an ideal candidate. Continue reading

How one family’s grief and generosity became a lifeline for another

Review: Vivien Horler

The Story of a Heart, by Rachel Clarke (Abacus Books/Jonathan Ball)

The Story of a Heart was published last year, but I heard about it only when Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor with Britain’s NHS, won the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction this month on the strength of it.

It is an extraordinary narrative, touching, profoundly moving and beautifully, even poetically, written. It tells the story of two nine-year-old British children, Keira and Max, whose lives became inextricably entwined when Keira was in a catastrophic car accident.

In the midst of their grief, her family opted to donate her organs – heart, liver and kidneys – saving four lives, two of them children. Continue reading

BedsideTable Books for June

These are among the books that have crossed my desk this month. The first three, The Paris Express, Butter and I Am a Girl from Africa are among Exclusive Books’ top reads for June. Some will be reviewed in full later. –  Vivien Horler

The Paris Express, by Emma Donoghue (Picador)

In 1895 the Paris Express from Granville on the Normandy coast burst through the front wall of Montparnasse station in Paris, killing a newspaper seller on the pavement below – but, remarkably, no one else.

As the acclaimed author Emma Donoghue (Room, The Wonder) writes in an author’s note, the derailment was, technically, a minor one.

And yet she has written “an edge of your seat historical thriller” that cannot be put down. I haven’t read it yet, but I have started.

It begins with a description of some of the people on board the train that October day, starting with young Mado Pelletier, who has taken an overnight trip to Granville to see the sea, and to buy “what she needed”.

Then there is seven-year-old Maurice Marland, making his first major rail trip all by himself, (who in real life went on to become a Resistance hero in World War II).

There are the “rollers” – the two men on the footplate, and the guards, one of whom appears to have saved the day, and many other passengers, real and imagined.

The Paris Express looks most interesting, and since it’s written by an acclaimed storyteller, is probably very good indeed.

Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton (4th Estate)

Rika Machida is a socially aware, anti-misogyny journalist who is desperate to have an interview with gourmet cook Manako Kakjii. But Kakjii is in prison, awaiting a retrial for the murder of three businessmen she is said to have seduced and defrauded.

Kakjii ignores all Rika’s written entreaties, until a friend suggests a different way of getting through to the prisoner – by asking her for a recipe.

This prompts an immediate response: “Feel free to come and see me whenever suits you. Regards.”

Rika drops everything to get to the prison. She is not much of a cook herself, but realises she is going to have show some interest in food if she is to get Kakjii to open up to her.

When Kakjii asks her what’s in her fridge, and she mentions margarine, Kakjii is appalled. Even if you can’t cook, she says, you could make hot rice with cold butter and soy sauce.

“There are only two things I can’t tolerate,” says Kakjii. “Feminists and margarine.”

Back home Rika tries the rice/butter/soy recipe and is enchanted. A BBC reviewer of this novel wrote she made this recipe herself “and it’s incredible”.

And that’s the beginning of this intriguing novel that has been an international bestseller.

I Am a Girl from Africa – A memoir of empowerment, community and hope, by Elizabeth Nyamayaro (Scribner)

This memoir opens with a little girl lying in the dirt under a leafless, drought-ravaged tree, telling herself to get up. But she can’t. She is close to death from starvation.

And then she senses a shadow, and looks up to see a much older sisi standing over her. This sisi kneels down and produces a bowl of porridge, which the little girl gobbles up. She tells the child she is from Unicef, and is there to help feed hungry children.

Elizabeth Nyamayaro writes: “What I don’t know yet is that this particular encounter will define the purpose of my life, acting as a beacon that motivates my actions and aspirations; the light that guides me through every darkness.”

And it’s an extraordinarily inspiring tale, because little Elizabeth, who spent her first 10 years in a remote rural village in Zimbabwe, and went to school for the first time when she was 10, has gone on to become a political scientist and former senior advisor to the Under-Secretary -General and executive director for UN Women.

She has also had leadership roles at the World Bank, the WHO and UNAIDS.

She now lives in New York.

Behind Prison Walls – Unlocking a safer South Africa, by Edwin Cameron, Rebecca Gore and Sohela Surajpal (Tafelberg)

My heart sank a bit when this volume landed on my desk. As retired Constituional Court judge Edwin Cameron says in a foreword, despite SA having 243 prisons, we prefer not to think about them. “Like abattoirs, they are designed not to be open or transparent.”

I live close to Pollsmoor Prison and pass it most days. Sometimes friends and I go for a meal at Steenberg Village, which shares a boundary with Pollsmoor, and the plight of those inside does cross my mind when I’m off to a nice evening of dinner and wine.

Cameron writes that for the most part, “our prisons are miserable and failing in their task of rehabilitating inmates… Overcrowding is ever present, a dangerous bane for personnel and prisoners alike”.

Not the first book you reach for. And yet I’ve found the first two chapters thoroughly readable – who knew Judge Cameron’s father had spent time in prison for car theft?

So maybe worth reading after all.

Corporate Newsman – A life of integrity, by Kaizer Nyatsumba

Kaizer Nyatsumba and I worked at different newspapers owned by the same company, he at The Star in Johannesburg and me at the Cape Argus in Cape Town.

But his career path was stellar – what happened to me, as my mum might have said.

In a foreword to this autobiography, The Star’s former editor-in-chief, Peter Sullivan, said of Kaizer: “He is like one of those Russian dolls, the matryoshka, each time you uncover one there is another inside.”

Sullivan then goes on to list Kaizer’s many manifestations: “Academic, sportsman, activist, author, poet, journalist, father, businessman, political analyst, TV personality, role model, fearful of his God, respecting his ancestors. That’s 12… of course there is Kaizer the lover, and husband…”

His early years were typical of the lives of many poor, rural African children – his first home was on a farm near White River and school was kilometres away – but his life trajectory has been anything but typical.

He won a bursary to Georgetown University in Washington, later joined The Star, eventually rising to become the first African editor of a mainstream newspaper in SA, the Independent on Saturday.

And from there it was into the boardrooms of Anglo American, Coca-Cola, Sasol – not a happy time – and PetroSA.

There have been – as there are in all lives – ups and downs, but Kaizer’s trajectory is probably summed up by the title of his epilogue chapter: “A life well lived”.

The Man Who Changed a Landscape – The Adrian Gardiner Story, by Dean Allen (Dean Allen)

Here’s another tale about a remarkable South African – Adrian  Gardiner, the man who created Shamwari Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape and introduced upmarket eco-tourism to the country.

This book is a vanity project, but a quick scan reveals it to be well-written and interesting, authored by the man who wrote Empire, War and Cricket.

Born in Bulawayo, Gardiner was educated at UCT (a party animal, he took seven years to get his undergraduate degree) and his first job was at Spar’s head office in Cape Town, followed by a stint at Golden Arrow. His first foray into the Eastern Cape was thanks to going back to Spar there.

A varied and mostly successful career followed. In 1989, living in what was then Port Elizabeth, with his sons at school in Grahamstown, he decided it would be fun to buy a small farm in the Eastern Cape as a weekend retreat.

The farm, not far from what is now Makhanda, had been farmed and over-grazed for generations. Yet as Allen points out: “Within three short years he would not only develop this part of the Eastern Cape into an exclusive wildlife destination. He would also bring back the elephants and other species that belonged there.”

This book tells the story of how he did it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once it’s got you, it never lets you go

Review: Vivien Horler

Addict – A tale of drugs and recovery, by Milton Schorr (Penguin)

Addict is a tough read for adults. What I would like to see, though, is it rewritten, perhaps in a comic or graphic book format, aimed at 12-year-olds.

Because Addict is a cautionary tale, and the warnings it contains are stark. It is impossible to overstate how much better prevention is than cure, because there seems to be no such thing as cure at all.

Milton Schorr writes unflinchingly about his life, but I flinched, often. There was a temptation to put the book aside, and I nearly did, several times. And yet. Continue reading

Life in SA: there are no facts – only interpretations

Review: Vivien Horler

The Interpreters: South Africa’s new nonfiction, edited by Sean Christie and Hedley Twidle (Soutie Press)

When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission sat in the mid-1990s to dig out the secrets of South Africa’s nefarious past, it was decided to use simultaneous interpretation, a process relatively new here.

It all sounds quite simple and obvious, as quoted in a piece titled The Interpreters: “Speakers speak as they normally would while the interpreter listens to one language and reproduce the same content in another, lagging slightly behind the speaker.”

But, as a moment’s reflection would make clear, it is neither simple nor obvious. It is hard to do, and The Interpreters Office in the Southern District of New York says simultaneous interpretation “calls for concentration, mental flexibility, wide-ranging vocabulary in both languages, good diction, voice control and the ability to deal with many stimuli at once”. Continue reading

A deeply moving tale about life with an, er, bracing mother

Review: Vivien Horler

Blood’s Inner Rhyme – An autobiographical novel, by Antjie Krog (Penguin)

I have a magnet on my fridge that reads: “No matter how old she is, a mother watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.”

My mum was like that, and so clearly was the late Afrikaans writer Dot Serfontein, mother of poet and prize-winning writer Antjie Krog.

Very early on in this book Krog, who has spent a year overseas, goes home to the Free State to visit her mother.

And more or less the first thing Serfontein says: “Jeez, but your hair looks rejected! What was wrong with the German hairdressers?”

I know the feeling. Continue reading

Love and laughter can get you through a lot of – um – shit…

Review: Vivien Horler

The World According to Merle, by Merle Levin (Melinda Ferguson Books)

Merle Levin wanted to call this memoir Rolling Shit Backwards, with a picture of a dung beetle on the cover. This was vetoed by the powers that be, but she has nevertheless dedicated it to “the ordinary, innocuous, unnoticed black beetle that quietly does its job of saving the planet by rolling shit backwards”.

The lesson of the dung beetle, which she studied as a child with her wise nanny in the Kalahari Desert, is that it fixes its course on a star to navigate homewards backwards, and finds value in what is thought to be waste.

For her 75th birthday, Jeff, her husband of 55 years, gave her a little metal sculpture of a dung beetle which now sits on her writing desk. “He reminds me daily of many important lessons – the teachings of small things, the teachings of ‘shit happens’.” Continue reading

Chaos, street brawls and pure love – the joy of a dog in your life

Review: Vivien Horler

Three Wild Dogs – And the truth, a memoir, by Markus Zusak (Macmillan)

One does very much like a dog.

That was a line attributed to Queen Victoria in a play produced at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town a few years ago. She was right – one does.

But there are dogs and dogs, and Markus Zusak’s tolerance does seem to surpass understanding.

However, this is a book about dogs, and one does… etc.

Zusak is the author of the mega-selling The Book Thief, but in this memoir he comes across as a pretty ordinary bloke living in Sydney with his wife and kids and, consecutively, three “wild” dogs.

My dog, Sofia, is a border-doodle, a medium-sized scruffy sort of miniature Bouvier. She is four now, and relatively well behaved, unless you are a cat or a squirrel – or a fisherman, because she’ll go for your lure. She’s been hooked in the flesh once. Continue reading

Oops!

A touch of finger trouble has led me to repost the Tony Leon review – which appeared on May 18 – again, on top of my May top reads.

Dear devoted readers, please scroll down to the May Bedside Table books, the compendium of some of the fabulous books that have landed on my desk this month.

Tony Leon’s delightfully waspish spin on the formation of the GNU

Review: Vivien Horler

Being There – Back stories from the political front, by Tony Leon (Jonathan Ball)

Former DA leader Tony Leon left active politics in 2009, but was hauled briskly on to the front line once again in June 2024 for talks with the ANC about setting up some form of shared government.

As a 30-something MP he was part of the Codesa talks, the details of which he remembers imperfectly. This time he decided to keep a detailed diary, the edited version which appears in this book. It makes for fascinating, illuminating and often waspish reading. It’s a delight.

Four days after the general election in May 2024, in which the ANC disastrously lost its parliamentary majority, current DA leader John Steenhuisen asked him to be part of a negotiation team in Johannesburg which could lead to the DA entering government. Continue reading