Book Review

AllAfrica News: Book Listings and Reviews

• South Africa: New Books - Queering Colonial Natal
  [New Frame] Debates over access to alcohol served to underline the emergent crises of white settler power that would grip the colony in the first decades of the 20th century.
  
  
• South Africa: Book Review - A Fire Like You
  [New Frame] In her third book of poems, A Fire Like You, Upile Chisala writes about the personal and the political. She moves from love and intimacy to race and issues around womanhood.
  
  
• South Africa: Book Review - Finding Common Ground On Land Reform After Covid-19
  [Daily Maverick] 'Finding Common Ground', a book by agricultural economist Wandile Sihlobo, is a useful collection of previously published work that paints a portrait of the state of South African land reform and the farming sector. One thing that struck this reviewer was the litany of missed opportunities and bungling that have set the land reform process back. The Covid-19 pandemic will set reform back even further while fuelling social tensions around it.
  
  
• Africa: The Thorned Roses of Uganda's Stella Nyanzi
  [The Conversation Africa] In No Roses from my Mouth, Stella Nyanzi pens 158 poems from the Luzira Women's Prison in Kampala, Uganda.
  
  
• South Africa: Book Review | Radicalized
  [New Frame] As climate change and capitalism rush us into any number of dystopian futures, Cory Doctorow's new work tells the stories of people who take back the power to effect change.
  
  
• Kenya: Kenyan Christian Queer Is a Powerful Departure From Despair
  [The Conversation Africa] The mark of a great book is often its ability to provoke robust debates and force readers to confront uncomfortable content. Kenyan, Christian, Queer by the academic Adriaan Van Klinken provides a way to imagine a future continent where members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community can exercise their rights to dignity, voice, agency, space and health without fear of stigma, harassment and worse.
  
  
• South Africa: Book Review - I You We Them - Journeys Beyond Evil
  [New Frame] Dan Gretton's magisterial work looks at corporate collusion with the Holocaust, how white-collar workers at desks in well-lit offices commit evil, and how 'violence bleeds from paper'.
  
  
• South Africa: New Books - Balance of Power
  [New Frame] President Ramaphosa's first speech as head of the country referenced the famous Hugh Masekela song Thuma mina, but the speech writer who used the lyrics meant them for Zuma.