South Africa Books

So very often I have wished for more than that which is suplied by a travel guide.

'Southern Africa Profiled' is full of essential information like where bus stations are located and interesting places to visit. But it is also packed with information which travel guides often neglect to include and gives one a true understanding of the area.

The book is not a substitute for a good travel guide. I would, however, recommend that a serious traveller to Southern Africa would benefit from buying this book. It certainly enhanced my experience of South Africa and Swaziland.

This book is a fascinating historical survey of Soweto, a sprawling black township on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Soweto started life in the 1930s as a dreary dumping ground for Africans displaced by slum demolitions. It grew into the largest black city in South Africa, as blacks streamed to Joburg to work in the white economy but were required to live in separate black areas. Soweto became the epicenter of black political and cultural life, and burst onto the world stage in 1976, when students rioted against school conditions. Their activism revived South Africa's dormant liberation movement and was a turning point in the struggle against apartheid.

The book adroitly mixes archival research with oral history, and navigates smoothly between grand political history and micro-level social analysis. It is lavishly illustrated with photos and documents, and virtually every page has quotes from Soweto residents gathered during the authors' research. The most harrowing pages chronicle the violence that engulfed Soweto in the 1980s and early 1990s, when political parties, criminal gangs, and ethnic groups waged open warfare on each other, often encouraged by police agents. While the authors are committed anti-apartheid liberals, they don't gloss over the excesses committed in the name of liberation.

In short, the book is smart, readable, and humane. A terrific achievement. Six stars.

Dozens of South African jazz musicians who lived through the apartheid years contribute to Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music, And Politics In South Africa, a hard-hitting discussion of how apartheid impacted the lives of ordinary people and musicians alike - and how struggles against it fostered new roads in music. The biographies, memoirs and recollections of a range of musicians blend with Gwen Ansell's survey of social life, politics and culture in South Africa, blending a musical history with cultural insights. Soweto Blues is well researched, intimate, and powerful: a 'must' for any fan of South African music and history.

Beautiful, clear color photographs of extraordinary beadwork. I cannot close the book. Makes me want to run to Africa and learn to bead from the Zulu people.

This work is noteworthy simply because there is so little in English on the East German involvement in the Third World, notably Africa. The authors were involved in the GDR's activities in the Dark Continent and do an admirable job of describing the fits and starts of the German efforts to support liberation movements in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia. At first more theoretical supporters of anti-colonial movements, the GDR became an enthusiastic (and as the authors imply, sometimes overly zealous) proponents of both armed and political solutions to the struggle against minority rule. The authors are also candid about the internal faults of their former nation, which contrasted their governments' support for democracy abroad while denying it at home. Hopefully there will be other books that detail the East German activities in the Third World.

We chose this book to give to members of a European group we were hosting, in part because it is in English, French, and German. The pictures are nothing but first rate though. The book is like a tour of what we saw in and around Cape Town. A totally satisfying purchase.

I bought, I read, I wonderd. I really think this must be a culminate work on "Nationalism" study among our contemporaries. At first you will see the argument of which this book treats is only limited to a regional/culturual/historical study on so-called Southeast Asia, but the author's brilliant thinking will lead us to the most effective "vantage ground" for analysing the universal "Nationalism" phenomena. I do recommend you this book and I do believe it is one of the must-have-items for every student and researcher who engages his/herself in human or social science.

Simply Stunning photography and the text is very interesting. A delightful depiction of Africa!

This is a profound exploration of an otherwise unnoticed topic in South African history. Well done!

You've seen the usual atlas that shows a map of the world or a country.

This book takes flat, boring columnar data related to health and the causes of disease and turns it into fascinating color maps. They show the world, based on life expectancy, violence, impact of global warming, illnesses like cancer, respiratory disease, HIV/AIDS, tobacco, alcohol use, unhealthy diet, access to health care...

And the images show surprising, enlightening findings.

This book is pure fact and data, yet it kept me up the night I received it, reading just one more page.

Seeing the data visualized in color maps makes it so clear just how brutally the industrialized world is inflicting the death and illness causes by climate change upon the third world.

We see how the US is one of the most violent nations in the world, at least when it comes to murders of males. The safest places for males, in terms of murdered men per 100,000 are France, Switzerland and Japan. We can see that China is addicted to tobacco more than almost any other nation. And the most suicidal nations are Russia and Eastern Europe.

This is an obvious gem for people doing international work-- not just in health. It's good to know where the violence is in the world, where the life expectancy is under 40 years, where the doctors available per 10,000 people is a tiny fraction of what it is in most of the world.

It makes sense that a book that displays health measures would measure the use of health measures. In this case, it displays a map of world, displaying which countries count what percentage of deaths. The US, Europe, Australia, Argentina, Syria, Israel, Lebanon and Uruguay measure 100%. Much of the world records less than 25%, including, not suprisingly, if I may get political, Iraq.

I can even see this book as useful to marketers seeking to identify markets for products and services.

The planet is overflowing with numbers and raw data. If all of it could be displayed in such meaningful, insightful ways, we would understand the world and each other much better.