Review: Myrna Robins

WINE + FOOD: The Art of (the) Perfect Pairing, by Fiona McDonald, Vickie de Beer & Charles Russell (Libertas Vineyards and Estates)

With our being allowed to buy wine again from tomorrow, it’s an ideal time to get hold of this book and explore the gentle art of pairing.

Libertas – the name brings to mind the part of Stellenbosch that’s steeped in wine and home to historic giants like Distell, formerly SFW, and venues like the theatre, the slow food market, the choir, concert auditorium – a wonderful mix of culture and wine in a stunning Cape setting.

The original Libertas was one of the oldest farms in the area, established in 1689. Today its name  refers to a group of wine farms and estates that owner Distell recently launched as a separate company of premium wine producers. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Equal – A story of women, men & money, by Carrie Gracie (Virago)

In 2013 BBC journalist Carrie Grace was made the corporation’s first China Editor. With the country a rising superpower, the BBC believed its story needed to be reported in depth.

Gracie had worked for the BBC for more than 30 years, had extensive Chinese experience, and spoke fluent Mandarin. She accepted the job on the basis that as the two jobs were on a par, she would be paid the same as the North America Editor.

The BBC is funded by license fees, paid by ordinary Britons for the privilege of listening and watching programmes produced by an organisation whose printed values include: “Trust is the foundation of the BBC; we are independent, impartial and honest.”

But it appeared the BBC was less than transparent when it came to salaries. The government stepped in; under the terms of the corporation’s 2017 Royal Charter, it was obliged to publish all salaries higher than that earned by Britain’s prime minister: £150 000 a year (roughly R2.5million at the time). Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

No Outspan, by Deneys Reitz (The House of Emslie)

If this doesn’t seem new, it’s because it ain’t. Old Deneys Reitz has been around for a long time, most significantly as the chronicler of Commando, the enduring classic of the Boer War, and only slightly less successfully in Adrift on the Open Veld, a combination of his trilogy in one volume by his dedicated publisher Trevor Emslie.

Emslie recently decided to publish the final volume of the trilogy on its own and it will still appeal to a certain generation of readers who remember Reitz fondly from those earlier volumes.

Reitz, with his quaint prose, is still a delight to read. He’s from a different era, now vanished. How he stands up in these times of political correctness is hard to gauge, but we need to remember that he completed his book 77 years ago when things were very different and light was beginning to emerge from the tunnel that was World War 2.

Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins (Tinder Press)

Reviewing the novel American Dirt has been made marginally more difficult by “the firestorm” –  according to the US’s National Public Radio – that erupted when it was published in the United States in January.

It’s the story of a middle-class, bookshop-owning Mexican woman named Lydia whose family is gunned down by a drug cartel in Acapulco. She believes the cartel will come after her and her surviving son, eight-year-old Luca, and so they flee northwards, facing many dangers, towards the assumed safety of the US.

But critics, particularly Latino critics living in the US, have excoriated the book, saying it does not reflect the truth of the immigrant experience and that it uses harmful stereotypes,

One of the most uncompromising critics is Los Angeles Times writer Esmeralda Bermudez, who wrote: “In 17 years of journalism, in interviewing thousands of immigrants, I’ve never come across anyone like American Dirt’s main character.” Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Trouble with my Aunt, by Hedi Lampert (Porcupine Press)

Aunty Vi is Granny’s cross to bear, a metaphor that 10-year-old Leah doesn’t entirely understand, but she gets the gist.

Being at a Jewish day school she doesn’t pick up the Christian reference, and imagines the cross as a large X of the sort Leah gets in class if she’s made a spelling mistake. If Aunty Vi is Granny’s cross to bear, then Granny must have made a mistake.

And so it turns out. Aunty Vi is strange – what in 1971 we might have called retarded or even simple. This suited Leah as a very little girl, as Aunty Vi was on her wavelength, but as Leah  grows older she sees that her aunt is not like other people.

One day Amy, Leah’s mother, confides that her mother, Sadie, became pregnant again when Amy was just nine months old and Sadie herself was only 20. She tried to abort the baby, and irreparably damaged her. Hence Sadie’s cross. Continue reading →