Book Reviews

[New Frame] In Hawa Hassan's cookbook, elderly women from Somalia to Cape Town, whose voices and food contributions are often overlooked, take centre stage. Dishes prepared with love dominate the pages. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future explores a path away from the deadly realities of capitalism, with worldwide peoples' movements leading the charge to salvation. (AllAfrica)

[Daily Maverick] David Bristow's latest volume begins with a warning to conspiracy theorists, creationists and climate-change denialists who learn all they know from TV and social media: This is not for you. (AllAfrica)

[Shabait] Recently I read the book, The History of the USA in Eritrea: From Franklin D. Roosevelt To Barack Obama and How Donald Trump Changed The Course Of History, written by Amanuel Biedemariam, an Eritrean-American author. Published in August 2020, the book provides a broad overview of the US' relationship with Eritrea over the decades. Here, I offer a brief review of the book and then a short summary of my recent conversation with the author. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] Bongani Nyoka grapples with the renowned South African scholar's engagement with African archives in an effort to begin the process of decolonising knowledge. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] Mia Arderne has entrenched her debut novel in the northern Cape Town suburbs of her youth through its language, characters and their experiences, offering acute observations of contemporary South Africa. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] Silvia Federici explores how in fighting for their rights, migrant domestic workers circulate practices that influence feminist politics and foster cosmopolitanism. (AllAfrica)

[Daily Maverick] Few books open with a line that says 'don't be taken for a p***s. This is particularly hard to remember when it's year end'. From the first page, 'Mermaid Fillet' draws you into its pages with its sharp writing about women, Cape Town and feminism. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] Brit Bennett's latest novel explores the lives of two Black women who go to great lengths to deny their roots and legacy, and the harm this causes to themselves and those around them. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] David Berry's extensively researched history of lawn tennis, from its start in Britain to its status as the Grand Slam to win 150 years later, reveals the little-known more progressive side of the game. (AllAfrica)

[Observer] - (AllAfrica)

[AfricaFocus] The new book Common Threads (along with an accompanying video, both open access), explores the ties that bind India and Africa through the material medium of cloth, from antiquity to the present. Cloth made in India has been sold across African markets for millennia, by Indian, African, and European traders. ... Most significantly, it highlights the role of African consumers in defining the evolution of these genres of fabric, and the centrality of people-to-people connections in sustaining the continued c (AllAfrica)

[The Conversation Africa] Twenty years ago the South African academic Jan-Ad Stemmet met the apartheid era justice minister Kobie Coetsee, who announced he had transcripts of 13,000 pages of recordings of Nelson Mandela's time in prison. (AllAfrica)

[Africa Renewal] In 1977, a thirty-three-year-old Ghanaian economist with the World Bank was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder that confounded doctors in a hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, United States. One day, his heart almost stopped as he passed out. He was later transferred to the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Washington, D.C. where another team of doctors successfully treated him. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] In their third novel, author Akwaeke Emezi uses a death to explore a life in Nigeria that was often confusing, displaced and frowned upon, but also filled with unexpected love. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] Nechama Brodie's book is a historically conscious study of gender-based violence and femicide that traces the lineage of the feminist vocabulary developed to speak about and combat the phenomenon. (AllAfrica)

[Premium Times] Column writing in newspapers, magazines or the social media beyond the entertainment aspect should be a platform not just for sharing knowledge but also a place for interrogating important issues. Everyday for the Goliaths: What Manner of Democracy is this ?, The Devil is not in the Politics and Politics is not a Game for Gentlemen are primarily collections of articles written by Simbo Olorunfemi over a period of five years, from 2014 to 2019. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] Boswell's forthcoming book And Wrote My Story Anyway archives the work of several women writers, positing that their fiction is a site of feminist theory. Her own fiction writing does the same. (AllAfrica)

[Daily Maverick] "I've tried to give everyone their say, and not to pass judgement." - Andrew Harding discusses his new literary nonfiction thriller, 'These Are Not Gentle People'. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] Greg Ardé's War Party: How the ANC's Political Killings Are Breaking South Africa is a cautionary tale of how the murderous rot in one province is damaging an entire country. (AllAfrica)

[African Arguments] In one neat volume Camilla Toulmin has documented the deepest historic change that humanity makes; the change from hand-to-mouth diurnal farming to modern agriculture. The book's story is told through 35 years of one Sahelian village in the north of Mali, Dlonguebougou - DBG as it is called. (AllAfrica)

[The Conversation Africa] It would be a truism to say that the functions of trains in modern history have been diverse and multifarious. Steam engines were drivers of the British industrial revolution, and the motors of internal westward expansion in North America. Railways were instruments of imperial expansion, as exemplified in Cecil Rhodes' Cape-to-Cairo fantasy, and instruments of extermination, carrying Holocaust victims to their awful fate. (AllAfrica)

[African Arguments] Debating Ideas is a new section that aims to reflect the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It will offer debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] Tade Thompson's Rosewater story mashes up cyberpunk saga, scifi horror, diplomatic thriller and liberation tale in three books that pulse with anticolonial sentiment. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] Nigerian-American writer Bassey Ikpi has assembled a compelling body of essays that deal with the delicate complexity of memory, mental illness and truth (AllAfrica)

[East African] The chequered history of pre-modern Liberia is reimagined with in a magical style in She Would be King, a debut novel by Liberian-American Wayetu Moore. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] By representing an intimate conversation between two friends in the struggle, an illustrator gets to imagine her heroes in action and contribute another small piece to history's record. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] Onkgopotse Abram Tiro, biographer Gaongalelwe Tiro's uncle, was the first South African freedom fighter the apartheid government pursued beyond the border and killed with a parcel bomb. (AllAfrica)

[New Frame] Onkgopotse Abram Tiro, biographer Gaongalelwe Tiro's uncle, was the first South African freedom fighter the apartheid government pursued beyond the border and killed with a parcel bomb. (AllAfrica)

[Citizen] Xenophobia refers to prejudice against people from other countries. South Africa does not have a xenophobia problem. I say this because there are thousands of immigrants from European countries in South Africa. These - mainly white - foreigners have never been attacked in my country, and probably never will. South Africans don't rage against all foreigners - just the poor, black ones from Africa.We are guilty of Afrophobia, not xenophobia. (AllAfrica)

[The Journalist] In 2007, South African writer Kopano Matlwa burst onto the literary scene with the publication of her debut novel Coconut, which went on to win the European Union Literary Award. Spilt Milk was her second novel, which won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in 2010. Our books editor, Kay-Dee Mashile, reviews Matlwa's latest novel, Period Pain, which was recently shortlisted for the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize. (AllAfrica)