Reviewer: Archie Henderson

War and Peace, by Nigel Hamilton (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Winston Churchill, so the legend goes, said that history would treat him kindly for he intended to write it. Even if he never actually said it, he did write it. His six volumes of The Second World War, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, has long been a standard reference for historians and World War 2 buffs.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his friend, ally and often sparring partner in the war, did not get the same treatment, dying in February 1945 relatively young at 63, before the war ended and before he got the chance to tell his side of the war. Nigel Hamilton has recently completed what amounts to Roosevelt’s memoirs, a three-volume work, FDR at War.

War and Peace is the final volume, with the sub-title FDR’s Final Odyssey: D-Day to Yalta 1944-45. The first volume was The Mantle of Command: FDR at War 1941-42, followed by Commander in Chief: FDR’s Battle with Churchill 1943. Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

Gunship over Angola, by Steve Joubert (Delta Books)

This story is not as gung-ho as the title implies. It is a charming, and at times even poignant, memoir of a boy who wanted to fly.

Steve Joubert grew up on the outskirts of Pretoria in Wonderboom. Watching the SA Air Force pilots, in a variety of aircraft, pass overhead every day, he had the classic little boy’s dream of becoming one of those men in their flying machines.

His dream came true early. Progress from the Air Force Gymnasium to the pupil pilot’s course was swift despite some amusing setbacks at the start. He literally stumbled in his interview before a pilot’s selection board headed by none other than the legendary Korean War fighter pilot General Bob Rogers. At the time, Joubert believed his dream to be doomed before it even took off. Continue reading →

Reviewer: Archie Henderson

 Vuvuzela Dawn – 25 sports stories that shaped a new nation, by Luke Alfred and Ian Hawkey (Pan Macmillan)

Being a sportswriter is better than having a real job. Getting paid to go to Newlands, or Ellis Park, or King’s Park, or Loftus, or the Wanderers – or wherever it is that games are played – is one of life’s great pleasures. It is a privilege that comes to only a few.

On and off during the past 50 years or so it was my privilege. OK, we used to moan and complain as much as our colleagues who were not that privileged, but we always knew that we were, to risk a hoary old sports metaphor, on a good wicket.

Those of us who worked in the sports department (derisively referred to the toy department by the envious) had a lot of fun too. Opinions in sports stories were positively encouraged whereas our colleagues in the newsroom had to avoid them like the plague. Cliches, of course, came thick and fast. Continue reading →

Review: Shirley de Kock Gueller

Museum of the Revolution by Guy Tillim (MACK and Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris)

Published to coincide with his exhibition in Paris  at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Guy Tillim’s book, Museum of the Revolution, is his record of Africa post-colonialism.  It’s a “new reality” of “rebuilding and enterprise”, one that reflects the changes that have taken place. Tillim, the recipient of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson 2017 Award,  was in Paris for the opening of the exhibition, which runs until June 1.

The winner of several other awards  such as the Daimler-Chrysler and the Robert Gardner Award from the Peabody Museum at Harvard, Guy Tillim is considered to be the leading photographer of Africa as it is today. The book is a result of five years to 2018 spent walking the streets of Africa, from Johannesburg to Dakar and Dar, Luanda to Maputo.

As a photojournalist in the 1980s and1990s in Africa, he captured political events, gruesome and very real, for local and international media such as Reuters and Agence France Presse. His documentation of, for instance, teenage soldiers in Rwanda, civil war in Congo, the mayhem that was Angola, resulted in exhibitions and in publications detailing Africa perhaps at its worst. Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

Steinheist, by Rob Rose (Tafelberg)

Rob Rose can read a googly as well as he can a balance sheet, especially the leg-spinner’s wrong ’un out of the back of the bowler’s hand, or the crooked accountant’s one trying to disguise a fraud.

It’s his skill in deciphering company figures rather than spinning balls on the cricket pitch (where he captains and opens the batting for his team) that Rose brings to bear in this remarkably entertaining book. If you thought balance sheets and accounting practices were boring, Steinheist will change your opinion.

Rose brings another, vital, element to his story of Markus Jooste and the biggest case of white-collar chicanery in South African history: his dogged reporting skills. Hell, he even interviewed the Hermanus whale crier to get a sense of Skelm Markus. Continue reading →

Reviewer: Archie Henderson

South Africans versus Rommel: The Untold Story of the Desert War in World War II by David Brock Katz (Jonathan Ball)

Erwin Rommel gets more play in the title than in the book itself. That’s because David Katz’s original publisher, the American group Stackpole, which specialises in military books, believes that Rommel sells, just as Montgomery does, or Patton.

Stackpole might be right and now Jonathan Ball has published a paperback version that is likely to do well on the South African market. Katz’s book lives up to the first part of its title in drama and detail, of which there are plenty of both.

To be flippant for a moment about a serious book, if the title sounds a bit like a sports fixture, Rommel wins two-nil. His Panzer Army destroyed a South African brigade during the battles around Sidi Rezegh in Libya in the northern winter of 1941, then he captured an entire South African division at Tobruk six months later. The two events were among the greatest three disasters suffered by South African soldiers, Delville Wood in World War 1 being the other. Continue reading →

Reviewer: Archie Henderson

The House of Islam: A Global History by Ed Husain (Bloomsbury)

Islam often gets a bad press. Isis, Al Qaeda, Hamas and other terror groups, murderous dictators such Muammar Gaddafi, Sadam Hussein and Bashar al-Asad are to blame. All have exploited a benign religion for vicious sectarian purposes, but are they any worse than bigots and extremists of Christianity, Hinduism and, of all people, lately the Buddhists of Myanmar?

We live among Muslims, enjoy their food and hospitality, respect their beliefs and think we understand them. Maybe we don’t, and this is where Mohammed (Ed) Husain can help.

Husain is the kind of person we seldom hear about, a liberal Muslim. Once a committed Salafist, he later became a Sufist and brilliantly explains the difference between these two strands of Islam in this book.

Salafism is the equivalent of the religious bigot – the puritanical Muslim and part of an Islamic faction supported by Saudi Arabian proselytisers and funded by the kingdom’s oil riches. Husain, in his interpretation of the Shi’ite-Sunni split in Islam, helps explain just how hypocritical the West – and especially the US – is about Muslims; the murder of Jamal Khashoggi being only the most recent example. It’s all right to bomb one Muslim country while excusing gross human-rights violations in another.

The book helps us understand what is happening in the world’s most recent forgotten war, the one in Yemen, and the conflict between Jews and Palestinians over Israel without falling for both sides’ propaganda.

Husain, who has embraced Sufism, which he estimates to be the faith and culture of 80% of Muslims in a world population of almost two billion, puts the anger of the other 20% down to centuries of indignity suffered by Muslim people, especially those in the Arab world.

Since the demise of European imperialism, however, there is a chance of a renaissance, according to Husein – even an accommodation with Israel. For that to happen, Muslims need to remember what it means to live and coexist in a free world – much as they did in the days of Mohammed 1 400 years ago.

There is a glowing blurb on the cover of the book I read. It’s from Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads, a history of the world from a Persian perspective. “This should be compulsory reading,” says Frankopan and for once it’s a valid endorsement.

Reviewer: Archie Henderson
The Natal Campaign: A Sacrifice Betrayed by Hugh Rethman (Amberley)

Just when you thought you knew everything about the Boer War, along comes Hugh
Rethman. His book is a radical revisionist history of that war fought at the turn of the
last century and which so dramatically shaped South Africa.
None of the usual suspects come of Rethman’s book well. Paul Kruger,
puritanical Old Testament president of the ZAR (the Transvaal) and General
Redvers Buller, the indecisive commander of the British forces, we expect, but Jan
Smuts? And even Louis Botha? The latter pair, heroes of the Union of South Africa,
are treated dismissively by Rethman. And Denys Reitz’s father, FW Reitz, who has Continue reading →