Review: Vivien Horler
Hijackers on Board – How one courageous whistleblower fought against the capture of SAA, by Cynthia Stimpel (Tafelberg)
The wholesale looting that has made up the State Capture project is so overwhelming that among many media consumers, including me, there is a tendency, when coming across some new malfeasance, to roll one’s eyes and move on.
It’s not that I don’t care – I do. But it’s all too much to keep track of.
And then you come across one focused, coherent account that details one aspect of the project, and it’s as if someone has shone a spotlight on what has been going on.
The someone in this case is Cynthia Stimpel, who was head of treasury at SAA.
Everything she describes in this book is in the public domain, much of it at the Zondo Commission, but her detailed and chronological account makes for truly absorbing reading. And it made me wonder how I would have responded had I been in a situation where I had a bond and children at university, and where pressure was mounting at work to just “Sign here”, “Just do it, Cynthia.” Continue reading
These are two novels about ageing women, written by mistresses of their craft. They are well worth reading, although your enjoyment might be helped by being an ageing woman yourself.
Jo is married to Frank and they have two children in their early 20s. Jo is fond of Frank, but he is not exactly a soulmate and is he enough for the rest of her life? And the children haven’t turned out as she expected: daughter Jamie has won a short-story competition with an offering about a young woman who wished she’d been aborted, and son Aaron is planning to join the military.
The Grief Handbook – A guide through the worst days of your life, by Bridget McNulty (Self-published)
Ougat – From a hoe into a housewife and then some, by Shana Fife (Jonathan Ball Publishers)
Unbecoming, by Joanne Fedler (Penguin Books)
Still Life, by Sarah Winman (4th Estate)
Lean Fall Stand, by Jon McGregor (4th Estate)
Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead (Doubleday)
Review: Vivien Horler
This fascinating jam-packed softback’s subtitle is: “Uncovering ancient Southern African kingdoms”, and contains a wealth of information on both the stone palaces in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa and the legacy of their early inhabitants, from AD 900 to around 1850.
When I was a news editor, a crime reporter whose mother tongue was not English, wrote an article about a hold-up and said the victim had been “gunpointed”.
I’d never heard of the Sackler family until I picked up this book. But it seems I should have. They were famous American philanthropists whose name adorned art galleries including the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum; buildings at Harvard, Tuft’s and Oxford and even a museum of art and archaeology in Beijing.
Mignonne Crozier has brought all her skills as a journalist, academic and researcher to uncovering the dreadful events of a massacre in East London on November 9, 1952.
The story of the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary is well known. Published by the Oxford University Press, it took many more years than the 10 originally planned, and began in a garden shed grandly known as the Scriptorium. The walls were lined with shelves which housed millions of slips of paper sent in from around the world giving the use and meaning of individual words. In The Dictionary of Lost Words Pip Williams invents a young orphan called Esme who spends her days under the sorting table in the Scriptorium. One day a slip of paper flutters to the floor containing the world “bondmaid”. Eventually Esme realises some words, especially those relating to women and their experiences, somehow never make it into the dictionary. So she starts collecting them for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.
We’ve all heard of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought World War II to an end. But I didn’t know anything about the incendiary bombing of scores of Japanese cities, including Tokyo, which must have killed hundreds of thousands of people, in the months between March and August 1945. The bombing, by the Americans, was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay and was springboarded from the Marianas islands which, after they had been wrested from the Japanese in 1944, finally put Tokyo within flying distance of B-29 bombers. And yet all this is not really what The Bomber Mafia is about. It is about a dream that went wrong, and what happens when technology and good intentions collide.
The Swarts are an ordinary white family, clinging to what they call their farm on the outskirts of Pretoria. The story of their decline is told in four snapshots, each one involving a family funeral, and each one happening in a different decade of South Africa’s recent past. The protagonists get older and life grimmer, and at the novel’s heart is a promise made years ago, and not kept. One reviewer says the prose is “leavened with languid comedy, as thought Galgut had collaborated with Tennessee Williams. The effect is utterly compelling.”
This is what Wikipedia has to say about Oxycontin: “Oxycodone, sold under the brand names Roxicodone and OxyContin among others, is an opioid medication used for treatment of moderate to severe pain. It is highly addictive and is commonly used recreationally by people who have an opioid use disorder.” The Sackler family are the owners of Purdue Pharma, the developers of Oxycontin, and this book is about three generation of the family and their legacy. It is said that the company helped spark an opioid epidemic that has killed nearly half a million Americans in the past 20 years.
Telling stories staves off hunger, which is just as well as Father doesn’t have a job and Mother’s miserable maize plants aren’t going to feed many. This is a coming-of -age novel set in Gushure Village, in rural Zimbabwe in the period from the Second Chimurenga to independence, and according to the cover, features malevolent mermaids, eccentric shamans, outrageous relatives, fearsome teachers and men who transform hippos.
Go Away Birds is a lovely read about Skye, a young woman who’s more or less lost the plot. She is suffering from grief for a loss she has never been able to talk about, not even to her husband Cam. She and he own a restaurant in Cape Town, but then an unwise remark in a magazine interview upends the business. Meanwhile during a Christmas with Cam’s family at Misty Cliffs, things unravel. Skye flees back to her family home in Mpumalanga, where her decidedly strange mother is running writing retreats and is possibly going bankrupt. Her brother is deeply suspicious of what is going on and is in some trouble too. Skye is convinced her marriage is over, and there is a rather nice chap on the farm next door, but things go awry there too. Maybe it’s time for her to stop running. Set in modern South Africa, the novel is nuanced and warm.
Most of us worry about money. And we especially worry about whether we will have enough money to retire on. In her introduction Kim Potgieter, a financial planner, says starting to think about your money at 60 is too late (so that’s me, then) and she adds: “The earlier you start, the more options you have.” She says her book is a call to action, a reminder that one’s second chapter is a chance to create one’s best life. Midlife, she says, is the perfect time to pause, tune in and decide what you’re going to do next.