Memoirs & Bios

Memoirs are stories told by one of the characters involved. They are meant to be ‘true’ in that they relate to an actual person’s experience. Biographies are similar, except that they are written by a third party, the biographer. South Africa is big on memoirs at the moment, perhaps largely because for so long people have felt ‘bottled up’ but are now much more able to see value in their experiences and to express them. This is an exciting time in local literature.

Memoirs & Bios

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Private Excavations -...
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Private Excavations -...

Private Excavations is superb travel writing with a profoundly important purpose. It is also a very necessary book for our rapidly polarising global village.

A journey through snow-clad northern Europe uncovers the fateful impact of a ‘one-truth’ vision of the world. By using as a platform important Scandinavians (writer August Strindberg and Advard Munch) the author explores absolutist thinking in its various religious and political guises. His fluid style blends evocative description with philosophy and history (especially art history) and persuades the reader towards a more humane understanding of existence. The extremists deny this point of view, content instead to seek salvation from an unacceptable world via their one-truth dogmas.

Price R130.00
Life is not a rehearsal by...
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Life is not a rehearsal by...

Medical Memoirs of a small town South African Doctor. This book is dedicated to anyone who is a patient, who has been a patient or who may become a patient. In fiction stories and characters are created by man, but patients are God’s creations.

To those waiting in doctor’s rooms with pimples and painful wounds, sniffing and sneezing to mommies with new born babies and grannies who tell bedroom stories to little children. To the sick, lame and lazy, to those with tics and those who are maimed or crazy, I share these memories in the hope and belief, that they will give you an understanding of a family practitioner’s life in small town South Africa.

Price R199.00
Landslide by Arthur Sithole
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Landslide by Arthur Sithole

Part memoir, part fact, part truth, certainly part of a blueprint to my greatest transformation Landslide not only documents an evolution towards a higher understanding, but is fundamentally, an account born of its own accord; when the truth about my life collided with the weight of my adversity.

Price R149.00
DIARY OF A CANCER SURVIVOR...
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DIARY OF A CANCER SURVIVOR...

B.O.S.S. = Brave, Optimistic, Sickness Survivor.

My book tells my unique story where I relate the trials and triumphs from parts of my journey of fighting prostate cancer, its related complications of acute renal failure and the complications of the late side-effects of cancer treatments. In my book I acknowledge and highlight the value of maintaining good relationships.

Price R140.00
Lessons from a Rainbow...
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Lessons from a Rainbow...

Samuel John Frederick Platt was born two months prematurely and rushed into the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. It soon became apparent that the new-born had a rare disease, confounding specialists and sending his parents, Melissa and Fred  Platt, on an emotional rollercoaster as his condition was misdiagnosed several times.

His distraught parents stood by Sam’s side and advocated for his needs, while feeling ignored by some of the health care professionals assigned to Sam’s care. After more than a year in a private hospital in Johannesburg, Sam’s parents managed to get a second opinion and secured a transfer to a hospital in Cape Town.

Price R220.00
Letters to Kuwait by Carlos...
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Letters to Kuwait by Carlos...

One day I suddenly thought, “My goodness, where’s Gareth?” So, I started looking. Last I heard, he was working with the British Army in Iraq, doing long stints: I tracked him down to prison cell in Kuwait. He had been used as a drug mule, nabbed and sentenced to death by hanging. His death was commuted to life and then further reduced to 15 years. When I located him, he had already been inside for four years. Thereafter I sent him a letter, every month, for 67 consecutive months. My Letters to Kuwait, were received by Gareth on his hidden device: news and comment on life in South Africa, my reflections on humanity and our world.

Price R290.00
ORPHANED, WITH LIVING PARENTS
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ORPHANED, WITH LIVING PARENTS

Many thousands of South African children are brought up by their grandmothers. This is one of the many manifestations of an unstable and distraught society, where the mother to child bond is too often broken, causing pain and a deep-seated sense of loss to both parties. Each Gogo-raised child’s story is different, but the general theme is the same: it deals with abandonment, with only qualified acceptance, but most of all with the simple absence of a real mother presence. The title of Vanessa Neo Mathope’s book – Orphaned, with Living Parents – tells it all. A monstrous imbalance has occurred, and the consequences run deep.

Price R260.00
No Taming of the Enthusiast
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No Taming of the Enthusiast

From skylarking at school to a professorship at the best university in Africa. It's all here in this collection of loosely related memoir-essays: all twists in the winding road the author travelled to become a female computer science professor at the University of cape Town. Born and schooled in the Netherlands, Ms Keet didn't stay home for long. Her winding road had a distinctly international flavour. She has worked and studied in Ireland and Italy, and briefly in Peru and Cuba, before finding her way back to South Africa. The author herself says of her essays: ' They offer a peek into a kitchen where underway is making of a woman into an academic scientist when the yeast has been gender-spiked against her chances of rising.'

Price R240.00
Absorbing too much of the...
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Absorbing too much of the...

What do you do when your son tries to strangle your husband? Only the author of this remarkable book has a ready answer for that. She takes the reader along for a frequently shocking life - affirming ride. It describes a wife and mother's journey into her son's mental illness. Her story allows us to see that recovery is not a neat, linear path, but instead a convoluted and complicated daily journey. 'In sharing her adversities and how she coped,' comments Kendal Brown, 'maybe we can draw some lessons from this brave lady to be better prepared for the lemons life all to often hands us.'

Price R250.00
The Race That Measures It...
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The Race That Measures It...

This book is a poignantly personal tale of two brothers’ journeys to becoming some of the youngest participants to race and finish the ABSA Cape Epic, after suffering life threatening accidents. It is an inspiring story, written in a casual and easy-to-read style that gives the reader a behind the scenes view of what goes on in the hardest bicycle race on earth.

The book illustrates Neil Fourie’s personal story of dealing with, and overcoming adversity after breaking his back at a South African National Mountain biking event.

Price R165.00
The Gods Who Fell From the...
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The Gods Who Fell From the...

A soul that is afraid of dying has never learned to live … This is the precept by which Dick Mawson has lived his adventurous life. He was born in England during the Second World War. With his parents he crash landed into southern Africa where he grew up.

Price R195.00
So Send I You - Finding the...
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So Send I You - Finding the...

This book charts a remarkable woman’s engagement with deep rural communities in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province – and in particular with the high numbers of brain-damaged children left stranded in huts all over the foothills of the great Drakensberg Mountains.

Price R180.00
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