Lobby Books:
Introducing the While You Were Sleeping Documentary Library:
While You Were Sleeping is a Cape Town-based non-profit collective committed to bringing progressive, non-mainstream documentary films with important social, political and environmental messages to South African audiences. Until now their DVD collection of interesting documentary films on a range of social, political and environmental topics has been stashed away on someone's book shelf. We're very excited to announce that the While You Were Sleeping Documentary Library has now found a permanent and more accessible home at Lobby Books. You can find out more about some of the documentary films in the library here. Join the library by paying a once-off deposit of R30 and rent out one or two DVDs per week absolutely free.
To find out more, contact Andreas: aspath@idasa.org.za
Book Review: Hunger for Freedom – The Story of Food in the Life of Nelson Mandela by Anna Trapido
“The best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” This is an old Xhosa saying emphasizing the role played by food in building concrete and lasting family relationships. Young married women were often advised by elderly women to keep the fires burning in their kitchen with the hope that husbands would always remember their home by thinking of what was being cooked in the kitchen. Some may think that is old fashioned but in this incredible book by Anna Trapido, pride in our food as South Africans has been reinstalled. In South Africa, food, just like football, is something that draws our nation together…
Read the whole review here.
New Arrival: Captured in Time – Five Centuries of South African Writing edited by John Clare
The time has come to delve into the story of South Africa’s turbulent history – a story of exploration and conquest, rampant growth and war, oppression and ultimately, liberation. Captured in Time tells that story in a collection of extracts from the most illuminating, entertaining and significant works written about the country and its diverse people over almost five centuries. The writers are settlers, explorers, administrators, missionaries, hunters, travelers, novelists, playwrights, poets and politicians. They include Jan van Riebeeck, Mazisi Kunene, the Xhosa poet, who chronicled the rise of Shaka in epic verse, WC Scully, who took part in the Kimberley diamond rush, Jan Smuts, Nelson Mandela, Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee.
New Arrival: The Unspoken Alliance – Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa by Sasha Polakow-Suransky
During the mid-1950s, the young state of Israel built diplomatic ties to postcolonial African nations on their common histories of oppression. But by 1987, Israel's alliances on the continent had completely changed - despite international sanctions, Israel maintained a close and covert relationship with South Africa; their military trade kept the Israeli economy vital and buttressed the faltering apartheid government. With recently declassified documents, Polakow-Suransky, an editor at Foreign Affairs, offers an important, provocative, and occasionally disturbing analysis of this clandestine alliance. He identifies two wars as decisive turning points in Israeli–South African relations. The 1967 Six-Day War and Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories alienated former friends and won it new enemies; and the 1973 Yom Kippur War left the economy in shambles, and created a powerful incentive for Israel to export arms to and cultivate its relations with the South African government. The author concludes his smart and readable study with a charged epilogue in which he writes that, as evinced by its policies towards Palestinians, Israel itself risks remaking itself in the image of the old apartheid state.
New Arrival: The Bridge – The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick
David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, offers a detailed account of Barack Obama's historic ascent. As a piece of "biographical journalism," the book offers commentary on Obama's cosmopolitan childhood with strains of isolation and abandonment straight out of David Copperfield - rootless, fatherless, with a loving but naïve and absent mother, he suffered racial taunts and humiliations at the hands of his schoolmates. We read how Obama's famous composure was hard-won, how he constructed his personality in opposition to his father's grandiose self-regard, his transformation from "Barry" to "Barack", the drug use and more. Remnick is in deeply respectful court scribe mode, but he does shine in his treatment of more peripheral characters such as Jesse Jackson and Hillary Clinton, both of whom emerge as figures of Shakespearian psychological complexity. This is a well-researched biography that pulls many trends of Obama-ology under its umbrella.
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