These are among the books that have landed on my desk recently. The top four – Breaking Bread by Jonathan Jansen, Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Catherine, the Princess of Wales by Robert Jobson and Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney – are from Exclusive Books’s top reads for October. Some of these books will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler
Breaking Bread – a memoir, by Jonathan Jansen (Jonathan Ball)
Jonathan Jansen is something of a national treasure. He has opinions on everything, primarily on education in South Africa, but he doesn’t confine himself to that subject. He’s been described as a professor, a pundit and even a public nuisance.
His is a prolific writer, has written many books, occasionally more than one at a time. He also writes columns and is often seen on social media.
After a stint as rector and vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State – he started there in the wake of the dreadful racist urination into food incident – he became distinguished professor of education at Stellenbosch University, and says now he is relieved of administration duties, he can do what professors are supposed to do: think.
He grew up on the Cape Flats, the eldest son of an intensely religious couple called Abraham and Sarah (and yes, he has a brother called Isaac) who were members of what he calls a fervent community of evangelical Christians. This gave him his founding values, and he says while he eventually he left the church, ”in many ways it never left me”.
He frames his life within the broader community, and says an important goal of this memoir was to give readers a sense of time and place… ”Put differently, this is not simply the straightforward story of a grateful life but one of a resilient community on the Cape Flats”.
Revenge of the Tipping Point – Overstories, superspreaders, and the rise of social engineering, by Malcolm Gladwell (Abacus Books)
Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling The Tipping Point – How little things make a big difference was published 25 years ago, and he wrote that it was “the biography of an idea”. It’s about trends, and what makes them spread, or as he puts it, “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread, just like viruses do”. The book spent several years – years! – on the New York Times bestseller lists.
The idea for this new book was to revisit some of the ideas published a quarter of a century ago, and then he realised he didn’t want to return to ground he had covered earlier as that world just seemed too different from our world today.
So he started again, and this book is the result. It is ”a new set of theories, stories and arguments about the strange pathways that ideas and behavior follow through our world”.
If it is half as interesting as The Tipping Point he’ll have another bestseller on his hands.
Catherine, the Princess of Wales – The biography, by Robert Jobson (John Blake Publishing)
Princess Catherine was of course always going to be a big story – beautiful, smart and the girlfriend of Prince William. But it seems in this past year or so, as she became the Princess of Wales, and took the public into her confidence about her cancer diagnosis, she has become something more – a person that people from all walks of life can identify with, a mum and – well, just nice.
Robert Jobson is a royal correspondent, and Catherine is only the latest in a number of titles he has written about members of the British royal family, including King Charles, Prince Philip, Princess Diana and Prince William, so he would seem well placed to write this biography.
He has attended many royal events in the UK, been on overseas tours as an accredited royal correspondent, and has met the Princess of Wales several times.
His sources for this biography are numerous, including members of the royal household, both on and off the record.
I noted the pictures in this book do not include the famous one of Catherine in a see-through dress modelling at St Andrew’s University, so could it be this biography is a touch sanitised? Then on the other hand, It seems there is not much to sanitise about Catherine. She seems to be brave and strong, a loving mother and a huge support to her husband.
Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney (faber)
An intermezzo is an interlude, according to Wikipedia, “a brief show (music or dance etc) inserted between the sections of a longer performance”. Intermezzdo is about two Irish brothers, Peter, a smooth, suave Dublin lawyer in his early 30s, and his much younger brother Ivan, a competitive chess player and a man who is probably “on the spectrum”.
Their father has just died, and the brothers struggle to come to terms with this. Peter is taking medication to help him sleep, and battling to juggle his relationships with two different women, his first love and a young university student.
As for Ivan, who has always been a loner, he meets an older woman who rapidly becomes an important part of his life.
The cover blurb tells us that “for two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility”.
The First Murder on Mars, by Sam Wilson (Orion/ Jonathan Ball)
This sort of book is really not my thing, I thought, when I first opened the parcel. Mars makes me think of Elon Musk and weirdos like that.
But it has shouts on the back cover from both Sarah Lotz and Lauren Beukes, with Lotz describing it as: “A fiercely intelligent, wholly engaging thrill-ride of a novel that sucks you in like a black hole.”
So I read the first 27 pages, and I think I’m hooked.
It seems to be the year 2103, and the colony on Mars has expanded, much like the one at the Cape did in the years after 1652. There is the Company Territory, the Free Settlements, and Outlier Territory.
It’s all pretty dystopian, with groups in the Free Settlements fighting each other, and the Company ruling with a rod of iron. Preferred methods of execution are tossing people out of the airlock.
The guard, Dylan, who works nights, gets paid extra for working during the slip, the 37 minutes tacked on at the end of the day to make Earth standard time work on Mars.
Food is grown in domes, and paper is made from vat-grown cellulose.
In his acknowledgements, Sam Wilson refers to a talk given in Cape Town by Khai Staats, who is an expert on the ways humans might live on other planets.
He said something along the lines of: “When people first arrive on Mars, things will be simple. There will be a small group of scientists, all working towards the same goals. Everyone will know each other, and everyone will trust each other. But slowly, the population will grow. People will be born, and people will arrive from Earth, and eventually things will stop being simple. There will be growing inequality and distrust, there will be politics, there will be crime, and eventually there will be murder.”
Which was the seed that fired Wilson’s imagination.
Beeld 50 – Om ‘n groote storie hard te slaan, compiled by Erika de Beer (Jonathan Ball Publishers)
In June this year came the devastating news: Media24 was planning to close down the print versions of several of its newspapers, including Beeld, Rapport, City Press, Daily Sun and Soccer Laduma, as well as the digital editions of Volksblad and Die Burger Oos-Kaap.
Three would continue to be published digitally only – Rapport, City Press and the Daily Sun, while the print version of Die Burger would continue.
So ironically in 2024, the year the Afrikaans daily Beeld celebrates its 50th anniversary, it looks as though the title is on the chopping block.
The process seems to have stalled while complex negotiations continue with potential buyers and also the Competition Commission, but in July Media24 said it would continue with Section 189 negotiations, basically rentrenchment negotiations. Around 400 jobs could be lost.
So instead of Beeld 50 being a celebration, it may be an epitaph.
Nevertheless, this is a great book, full of pictures, memories, behind-the-scenes newspaper anecdotes and 50 years of SA news stories.
Journalists – not just Media24 journalists – will smile at some of the memories, such as a reporter being told: “ ‘Calf sucks ma-cow dry’ – that’s the headline, write the story to go with it.” Remember phoning in copy on collect calls from a tickeybox – long before cellphones? Typing stories on manual typewriters, with carbon copies (where do you think the email term CC comes from?)
And then 50 years of news stories, from the Fox Street siege of 1975, the murder of Robert and Jeanne Smit in 1977, the Information Scandal, the bombing of Air Force HQ in Church Street in Pretoria in 1983, the dramas of Zola Budd, the ditching of the Helderberg in 1987, the freeing of Nelson Mandela in 1990, the sinking of the Oceanos in 1991, Chris Hani’s murder, the first democratic elections and Mandela’s inauguration in 1994, our winning the Rugby World Cup in 1995, Archbishop Tutu in tears at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, the death of Princess Diana in 1997, the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001, Charlize Theron winning an Oscar in 2004, Marikana in 2012, Oscar Pistorius’s murder of Reeva Steenkamp in 2013, the death of Mandela the same year, Thuli Madonsela’s report Secure in Comfort which was the beginning of the end for Jacob Zuma’s presidency, Covid in 2020, the death of FW de Klerk in 2021, the Zondo Commission into State Capture… a story of our times.
One Pot – Cookbook for South Africans, by Louisa Holst (Human & Rousseau)
A year or two ago I was sent Louisa Holst’s SA Air Fryer Cookbook, long before I had an air fryer, so didn’t male much of it. Then I got one of those useful devices, and found the book a boon.
I’ve since bought several copies for family and friends who were also venturing into this newish mode of cooking.
Now Holst has produced One Pot, and this time I don’t have to wait to try it out as I have several pots.
In her introduction she says this cookbook is for those busy days when you need an easy supper-time solution, whether there’s electricity or not (mostly there is, these days, mercifully).
All the dishes in the book are cooked on the stove top, as long as you have a gas hob (and since nothing is done in the oven, you’ll save on electricity too).
The ingredients are easily available, and the ingredient lists are shortish and economical. Nothing should take longer than an hour to prepare.
There are days, she says, when you might have time to spend hours creating slow-cooked specialities; the recipes in this book, which she dubs weeknight winners, are for the other days.
Chapters include one-pot wonders, which are warming comfort food; flash-in-the-pan foods like stir-fries, short-cut pasta dishes, a chapter on breadwinners – quick bread-based meals like Portuguese steak rolls or chutney chicken vetkoek; recipes ideal for batch-cooking for the freezer; a bunch of rice dishes like fish curry and rice and fragrant spiced pork and rice; and then a whole chapter on stove-top treats – try apple fritters or steamed chocolate coffee cake.
I think this cookbook will be a winner.