Books

Below is a list of books I have enjoyed in recent years. Mostly I pick up books from second-hand dealers, and purposely ignore the mostly banal and over-hyped and marketed best-seller trash. Over decades I have trolled though scores of second-hand bookshops in many towns, especially Fish Hoek charity stores, and this frequently updated list below is a sample of what I have discovered.

Biographies:

Iron Love by Marguerite Poland (a “novel,” but in reality a well-researched history of the lives of young men at St Andrews College, Grahamstown from 1913.)  A moving, action-rich and emotional slice of South African history revolving around young men in their last year at school and the years that followed.

Beautiful account of masculinity by one of South Africa's greatest living writers, surpassing the likes of the bleak and dour J M Coetzee, although I was intrigued by his Dusklands. Iron Love is Poland's best work. 

Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G K Chesterton by Joseph Pearce. Sometimes described as the “patron saint of journalists”, this “beneficient bomb” of the early 20^th century, good old GK, took Fleet Street by storm, writing a huge number of essays, biographies, plays, and the Father Brown stories. He debated with the great names of the day, disdaining conventionality, prophesying the wars and catastrophes that the century would witness. Says the book's inside flap: “A modern intellect, he strove for integrity, his religious faith and conversion to Roman Catholicism affecting every area of his life.” GK profoundly influenced C S Lewis, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. What also sets him apart is his massive and genial ability in public debate and his love of children. Despite his deep Christian faith, he was good mates with atheists like George Bernard Shaw and H G Wells. Pearce's meticulously researched biography on him is brilliant, accessible and absorbing. Don't think a better one exists. Walter de la Mare's tribute to GK follows: “Knight of the Holy Ghost, he goes his way/Wisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest;/The mills of Satan kept his lance at play,/Pity and innocence his heart at rest.

World History

 

  

The Pretence of Love: Prosititution and Society, Volume 1 Primitive, Classical and Oriental by Fernando Henriques. Published in 1965 by Panther Books. For example, one chapter is entitled The Whores of Africa. The Observer notes: “His writing on sex is neither statistical nor over-sentimental; he seasons his facts with plentiful digression and illuminates them with with wit.”. “Lively, informative and scholarly,” says the Sunday Telegraph. Not for the faint-hearted – there is some harrowing detail.

South African History

 The Sunburnt Queen by Hazel Crampton. Sold fairly well I understand, but this excellent window into little-known South African history, in narrative form, is deeply absorbing, well researched, nicely written and illustrated. Set along the Eastern Cape coast in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, it brings alive the fate of innumerable shipwrecked castaways – and their absorption into the Xhosa nation., focusing on the true story of a little British girl, Bessie, who was shipwrecked on that coastline at the age of six.

Social and political comment

   

Heresies – against progress and other illusions by John Gray. Granta Books, London. Published in 2004. Gray is a professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics.  Chapers include “Science as a vehicle of myth” and “Faith in the Matrix”.  Gray says, quite rightly, that “belief in progress is the Prozac of the thinking classes”. “History is not an ascending spiral of human advance, or even and inch-by-inch crawl to a better world. It is an unending cycle in which changing knowledge interacts with unchanging needs. Freedom is recurrently won and lost in an alternation that includes long periods of anarchy and tyranny, and there is no reason to suppose that this cycle will ever end. In fact, with human power increasing as a result of scientific knowledge, it can only become more violent. In a chapter on Joseph Conrad, he says that Conrad believed that social insitutions are criminality – but also that revolutionary violence was vain, deluded and inherently criminal. Says the blurb at the back of the book: “John Gray dares to be heretical like few other thinkers today.” I thoroughly enjoyed most of the book and applauded much of what Gray says

 The Dispossessed Majory by Wilmot Robertson. Published in 1981 by Howard Allen Enterprises. A giant subversive book, a scholarly work with over 600 pages -- by an ultra-conservative/radical nutter who may frequently enrage you as you read it. Said a reviewer: “I am needless to say, hypnotised, as if I were facing a cobra.”  It is a principally an American book about American issues. Despite some ludicrous elements, it is without question an accessible -- and academic work. Chapters include Racial Metaphysics; Unassimable White Minorities; The Atrophy of Education. Some issues dealt with by the author have a curious resonance with modern South Africa. Another reviewier says of the book: “The author thinks the unthinkable and says the unsayable”. I doubt if you'll find a copy anywhere. Libraries won't stock it, methinks.