Review: Vivien Horler 

A Different Kind of Power, by Jacinda Ardern (Macmillan)

The first time former New Zealand prime minister made an impression on me was watching her being interviewed live on TV in the Beehive, the equivalent of SA’s Union Buildings.

The journalist is in a studio and they’re discussing planning permission issues, when Ardern pauses, looks around and says: “We’re just having a bit of an earthquake here, Ryan, quite a decent shake.”

Then with a broad smile she says to the camera: “If you see things moving behind me.”

(Bizarrely the Beehive faces on to a Wellington street that actually runs along a faultline that can – and does – move at any time. This is part of the charms of living on a pair of islands on the edge of the Pacific’s “ring of fire”.)

The journalist asks her if it has stopped, and she says it has. He asks if she is all right, and can continue, and she says: “No, we’re fine, Ryan, I’m not under any hanging lights, and we’re in a structurally sound building.” And the interview proceeds.

Wow, I thought, wow. How impressive is that! (You can find that clip on YouTube. It’s still impressive.)

Possibly the picture of Ardern everyone remembers is that of her, taken through a window at a Christchurch community centre a day or two after the ghastly mosque attacks during Friday prayers that left 51 people dead and scores injured.. They were done by an Australian. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Names, by Florence Knapp (Phoenix)

What’s in a name? Everything, says Florence Knapp, whose debut novel is premised on how a name can affect the entire trajectory of a life.

Cora and her nine-year-old daughter Maia are on their way to register the birth of Maia’s newborn brother. Cora’s husband Gordon, a respected and well-liked GP, has reminded her he expects her to name him after himself, his grandad and great-grandad before him.

But Gordon is an abuser, both mentally and physically, and Cora is concerned not only about herself, but also how Maia is clearly trying to accommodate herself to the tensions at home.

On this morning in 1987, Cora is feeling rebellious. She asks Maia what name she would choose for the baby. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

On the Railway – The great South African Train Story, by David Williams (Tafelberg)

David Williams, a former deputy editor of the Financial Mail, has written books on topics ranging from sport to  the SA army to biography, but On the Railway feels like the one he was born to write.

He describes how, as a five-year-old in Estcourt in Natal, where his father was a railways electrician, he would wake before dawn in the family home beside the shunting yard, and watch as shunters used a big black steam engine to break up a goods train, separate the trucks and re-assemble them into new trains.

“I go to the window every morning when it is still dark and watch until the sun is well up in the sky. Every morning is the same, yet every morning is different, endlessly interesting.” Continue reading →

Review: Lyn Mair

Proteas of the Fynbos, by John Manning , photographs by Colin Paterson-Jones (Struik Nature)

This is the most interesting and up-to-date book on fynbos proteas, and what immediately catches the eye are the superb photos by the late Colin Paterson-Jones. 

If you are seriously keen to identify the many different species and genera of this huge and complex group of plants, it’s a good idea to have a botanical background but if you don’t, this book will be a great help in sorting them out.  

Right at the beginning John Manning answers the question What are proteas? With 1750 species worldwide he makes things easy for us in the Western Cape fynbos biome by separating the true Proteas from their close relatives the Conebushes Leucodendron, Pincushions Leucospermum, Pagodas Mimetes and Spiderheads Serruria, and then further dividing them into groups or clusters.   Continue reading →