Book Reviews

Revenge of the Tipping Point

Crimson Sands

Dirk Aruseb was seventeen years old when Abraham Morris fetched him from the Pella orphanage to join the Bondelswarts. Dirk could not wait to conquer the accursed Schutztruppe alongside legendary Kaptein Jakob Marengo, successor to Hendrik Witbooi and Jonker Afrikaner. But when he arrived at Schansvlakte deep in Namaland, Dirk was warned that he first had to master many life skills before he could join the war: be humble, be patient, be merciful. Find your eland, tame your butcherbird.

But for Dirk war was an adventure – as long as he could kill the German enemy, he was content. It did not matter what commander Nana Kruiper, or Klara Morris, her second in command, tried to teach him: that the liberation struggle of the Bondelswarts meant more than protecting Namaland – their promised land – at all costs.

Crimson Sands is set in Namaland and portrays events in German South West Africa and the Cape Colony between 1904 and 1922, when thousands of Bondelswarts were shot down by Jan Smuts’ fighter planes. It is an epic, panoramic war novel, traversing Southern Africa from Tsumeb to Upington, from internment camps in Windhoek to the dry riverbeds of the Fish River Canyon. Jeremy Vearey conjures a mesmerising tale across an arid landscape of sand, shrub and dune, evoking voices and stories long gone.

Margo's Got Money Troubles

As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet always knew she would have to make it on her own. So she enrols at her local junior college, even though she cannot imagine how she will ever make a living. She is still figuring things out and before she knows it, she has an affair with her English professor. While the affair is brief, it is not brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger.

Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion –fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up on her doorstep and asks to move in with her, she agrees in exchange for help with the childcare. Then Margo has a plan: she starts an OnlyFans profile as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she turns it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?

Exit Wounds

Award-winning writer Peter Godwin brings his “moving voice” (The Sunday Times, London) to his latest memoir about his evolving relationships with the women and places that shaped his life.

Peter Godwin’s mother is dying.

Born in England, and having spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe, she now lies on a sickbed in the partitioned living room of his sister’s London home.

Peter has spent his life missing his Zimbabwean childhood, a longing that does not diminish as he reflects on his time as a journalist on the frontlines of combat around the world, or life in New York with his English wife and transatlantic children. In his mother’s final months, he must come to terms with everything his family was and wasn’t: the secrets they kept from one another, the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them, and the beauty of the wildly different places they called home.

With generations of history behind him, Godwin lyrically brings us into the spaces which make us question and suffer, and shows us how we can heal our own scars and celebrate the lives we have among family and friends.

Nexus

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

- From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world.

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power.

But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis.

The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonisation of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.

Revenge of the Tipping Point

Twenty-five years after the publication of his groundbreaking first book, Malcolm Gladwell returns with a brand-new volume that reframes the lessons of The Tipping Point in a startling and revealing light.

What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do elite universities care so much about sports? What is the Magic Third, and what does it mean for racial harmony? In this provocative new work, Malcolm Gladwell returns to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena.

Through a series of riveting stories, Gladwell traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. He takes us to the streets of Los Angeles to meet the world’s most successful bank robbers, rediscovers a forgotten television show from the 1970s that changed the world, visits the site of a historic experiment on a tiny cul-de-sac in northern California, and offers an alternate history of two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis.

Revenge of the Tipping Point is Gladwell’s most personal book yet. With his characteristic mix of storytelling and social science, he offers a guide to making sense of the contagions of the modern world. It is time we took tipping points seriously.

An African History of Africa

Zeinab Badawi, award-winning broadcaster and president of SOAS, tells an epic story of the oldest inhabited continent in the world from an African perspective, for fans of William Dalrymple, David Olusoga and Peter Frankopan.

Everyone is originally from Africa, and this book is therefore for everyone.

For too long, Africa’s history has been dominated by Western narratives of slavery and colonialism, or simply ignored. Now, Zeinab Badawi sets the record straight.

In this fascinating book, Badawi guides us through Africa’s spectacular history – from the very origins of our species, through ancient civilisations and mediaeval empires with remarkable queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence. Visiting more than thirty African countries to interview countless historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and local storytellers, she unearths buried histories from across the continent and gives Africa its rightful place in our global story.

The result is a gripping new account of Africa: an epic, sweeping history of the oldest inhabited continent on the planet, told through the voices of Africans themselves.

- Elmarie Kotze