Review: Vivien Horler

The History of Bees, by Maja Lunde (Scribner)

A life without bees is unimaginable. Honey is the least of it – pollination is the major service that bees provide.

And as we all know, honeybees are dying out around the world. Maja Lunde, who is Norwegian, had her interest in the subject sparked by a documentary she watched on the phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder, something that she says both scared and fascinated her.

The result is this novel, a story about bees from three perspectives: one set in England in the 1850s, one set on a bee farm in Ohio in 2007, and one set in Sichuan in China in 2098. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Woman of State, by Simon Berthon (Harper Collins/ Jonathan Ball)

Maire Anne McCartney is a clever Catholic girl growing up in Belfast and doing her A-levels. Her family have high hopes for her. But she has a Provo brother and a Provo boyfriend, so there is an inevitability about the fact that she is recruited for an IRA mission. It’s a one-off, she is promised, and there will be no violence.

But they lied, and she is forced to flee alone to Dublin to start a new life for herself. It is lonely and tough, but she makes a sort of life studying law at university. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Hasta la Gupta, Baby! by Zapiro (Jacana)

Hadeda La Land – A new Madame & Eve collection, by Stephen Francis & Rico

When I was a child we always gave my dad a Giles collection for Christmas. And then there’d be arguments after the big lunch as to who got to look at it first. Dad didn’t always win.

There’s no dad any more, nor is there Giles (although sometimes you find a dusty old collection in a beach house, and smile as you page through them, remembering political events of decades ago.)

But in South Africa we have jolly fine substitutes from our top cartoonists, Zapiro and Stephen Francis & Rico, and there’s nothing like revisiting the tough political events of the year with a sugar-coating of laughter.

In his book Penpricks, a serious look at South African political cartoons, author and writer Ken Vernon said there could be no better guide to the country’s complicated and convoluted political history than its mixed bag of political cartoonists.

Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Garden Birds in Southern Africa, by Duncan Butchart (Struik Nature)

Guide to Seabirds of Southern Africa, by Peter Ryan (Struik Nature)

Poor old hadedas – in his forward to this delightful guide Duncan Butchart says we often forget to appreciate the pleasure birds bring, “although granted, the Hadeda Ibises can be a bit irritating!”

But we’re not as mean as the Australians. The Australian white ibis, which closely resembles our sacred ibis, is known there as a bin chicken, dump chook or trash vulture. Not kind. A skein of ibises flying home to their roosts at dusk is a lovely sight.

If you enjoy seeing little flocks of small grey birds with smart red beaks alight on your grass, but have no idea what they are, this is an ideal book. They are not wild finches as I first thought, but common waxbills, much more charming than their name suggests.

For the second summer in a row, a pair of greater striped swallows have spent time perching on a candelabra over my patio dining table, chirring charmingly and giving me much pleasure. I’m learning to live with the resulting mess on the table and chairs.

In a foreword, Mark D Anderson of Birdlife South Africa says the birds in our gardens provide opportunities for observation, education and conservation, and a chance to introduce children to the natural world.

He says as the vastness of the natural world shrinks, urban environments like suburban gardens are becoming increasingly important for the conservation of biodiversity. “Gardens play a small, yet important, role in protecting our heritage.” Continue reading →

Why James Suzman thinks we all should read his book:

If we judge a civilisation’s success by its endurance over time, then the Bushmen are the most successful society in human history. Their experience of modernity offers insight into many aspects of our lives, and clues as to how we might address some big sustainability questions for the future.

Review by Vivien Horler

Affluence without Abundance – the disappearing world of the Bushmen, by James Suzman (Bloomsbury/ Jonathan Ball)

This is an astonishing book of a scale which manages to address almost every issue faced by people today.

Yes, it is about Bushmen, in part, but it is also about economics, farming, patriarchy, and why we value work so highly.

Or, as James Suzman put it in an interview with the New York Times in July: Continue reading →

Review:  Vivien Horler

He – a novel, by John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton/ Jonathan Ball)

John Connolly is an Irish writer better known for his Charlie Parker thrillers, but he is different.

It is a novel about the legendary Hollywood comic duo of Laurel & Hardy, who won world acclaim between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, a period that straddled Prohibition in the United States, World War II and the fundamental shift in the film industry from silent movies to the talkies.

Connolly, born in 1968, after the deaths of both Laurel, the thin one, and Hardy, the fat one, says their films were part of his childhood, and that his affection for them has not dimmed.

But they were “figures from a distant past, moving through a monochrome world”, so he was entranced to discover that a friend in Los Angeles had once been given a derby hat by Stan Laurel.

“… it seemed impossible to me that someone I knew might not only have met one of them, but have been bequeathed a hat in the process.” Continue reading →