Review: Archie Henderson

The Cauldron – The making of the modern Middle East, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/ Jonathan Ball)

Sebag Montefiore (the preferred of his two first names) knows how to write a book.

And also how to sell one: he has been on countless podcasts, a guest on talk shows and in interviews at literary festivals.

All are wonderfully informative and hugely entertaining (you can find them on YouTube). The best is on Ask Haviv Anything, a history and current-affairs podcast hosted by Haviv Rettig Gur, an analyst at The Times of Israel, because Gur asks intelligent questions. The most entertaining, despite its tedious interlocutor who doesn’t give Montefiore a chance to punt his book, is from the Montreal Literary Festival.

That’s also because he’s on stage with Salman Rushie, who steals the show, especially with a marvellous line about President Donald Trump: “It’s difficult to respect a man who has bad grammar.” Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Mr Sidhu’s Post Office, by Amman Brar (Juniper/HarperCollins Publishers)

In 1999 the British Post Office introduced computer terminals into local post offices. Most villages and areas had a post office, but they were different from the post offices South Africans were used to.

They were often in a small local shop which sold basic groceries, with the sub-postmaster in his or her own little cubicle.

The computer system introduced was known as Horizon, and the Japanese company behind it was Fujitsu, a major global technology and IT services company.

From the beginning there were accounting problems, which escalated to alarming levels. According to Wikipedia, between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Life and Death of a Rock ’n Roll Sailor – A true story, by Diane Coetzer (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

Yachtsman Anthony Murray and his sister-in-law Diane Coetzer planned to write a book together about his ocean voyages. But not this one.

Anthony was an experienced sailor who delivered yachts all around the of world. Diane is a freelance journalist, and the daughter of the late lamented writer Owen Coetzer, with whom I worked on the Cape Argus and Weekend Argus for years.

Diane is also the partner of Jeremy, Anthony’s younger brother, who worked in the music production business.

On February 18, 2015, during a voyage delivering a Cape Town-built Leopard 44 class catamaran to Phuket in Thailand across the Indian Ocean in cyclone season, the catamaran and its crew of three lost all contact with the world. It had been expected in Thailand later in February. Continue reading →