Book picks similar to
Askari by Jacob Dlamini


non-fiction
africa
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Pride of Carthage


David Anthony Durham - 2005
    After conquering the Roman city of Saguntum, Hannibal wages his campaign through the outposts of the empire, shrewdly befriending peoples disillusioned by Rome and, with dazzling tactics, outwitting the opponents who believe the land route he has chosen is impossible. Yet Hannibal's armies must take brutal losses as they pass through the Pyrenees mountains, forge the Rhone river, and make a winter crossing of the Alps before descending to the great tests at Cannae and Rome itself. David Anthony Durham draws a brilliant and complex Hannibal out of the scant historical record?sharp, sure-footed, as nimble among rivals as on the battlefield, yet one who misses his family and longs to see his son grow to manhood. Whether portraying the deliberations of a general or the calculations of a common soldier, vast multilayered scenes of battle or moments of introspection when loss seems imminent, Durham brings history alive.

Happiness is a four-letter word


Cynthia Jele - 2010
    Suddenly, no amount of cocktails can cure the stress that simultaneously unsettles their lives. Nandi’s final wedding arrangements are nearly in place so why is she feeling on edge? Zaza, the “trophy wife”, waits for the day her affair comes to light and her husband gives her a one-way ticket back to the township. Tumi has only one wish to complete her perfect life – a child. But when her wish is granted, it’s not exactly how she pictured it. And Princess? For the first time ever, she has fallen in love – with Leo, a painter who seems to press all the right buttons. But soon she discovers – like her friends already have – that life is not a bed of roses, and happiness never comes with a manual . . .

In a Different Time: The Inside Story of the Delmas Four


Peter Harris - 2008
    They are a highly trained and experienced assassination squad reporting directly to Chris Hani.The narrative details their infiltration into the country, their operations, arrest and subsequent trial. These men are the foot soldiers who sacrificed everything. As their trial unfolds with their attorney fighting to save them from the gallows, so too does the story of their own lives and the choices they make. The story is set in a South Africa gripped by unrest and political tension, when the ANC was in exile and repression at its height.It tells of the extraordinary lengths people go to in order to fight for what they believe, and the acts people will commit to preserve the status quo. The characters are linked by bizarre coincidence and tragedy in a true account narrated by their attorney.Woven through the narrative is the construction of a bomb and its journey towards its target, and the circumstances which enable that meeting.

Trekking On: A Boer Journal of World War One


Deneys Reitz - 2016
     Now Reitz would join the war in Europe. Following his father’s example, Deneys Reitz refused to accept the terms of the peace treaty and went into exile, on Madagascar. After four years of trials and adventures, Reitz recounts how his former commander, J. C. Smuts, eventually persuaded him to return home to help rebuild their country. A long and troubled process, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War South Africans were further divided by the September 1914 rebellion. Serving alongside Smuts once more, Reitz describes an oft-overlooked theatre of the war as they continued their campaign into Germany’s African Colonies. Continuing immediately from Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer War, Reitz’s stirring memoir carries him towards the Western Front and the final years of the war, fighting with the British, but not for them. Deneys Reitz (1882-1944) was a Boer solider, lawyer, author and politician. After commanding the 1st Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front, at the end of the First World War he returned home, later becoming a member of the South African government. Trekking On is the second of three volumes he wrote about his life. Albion Press is an imprint of Endeavour Press, the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

Endings and Beginnings


Redi Tlhabi - 2012
    In this astonishing debut, Endings and Beginnings, she makes the painful journey back to her death-marred childhood, a journey in which she eventually finds peace and allows her demons to rest. Redi grew up in the '80s in Orlando, Soweto, with thoughts and emotions so intense they nearly swallowed up her childhood. It was a time when Soweto was under siege from two forces - apartheid and endemic, normalized crime. It was not strange or unusual to refer to so-and-so as 'the rapist' or so-and-so as 'the killer'. It was also at this time that her father - her hero - was violently murdered, his body discovered on the street, with one eye removed. The perpetrators were never found, and the neighbourhood continued to talk about how he had to be buried without his eye. And then Redi meets Mabegzo: handsome, charming and smooth; Mabegzo, rumoured gangster, murderer and rapist, a veritable 'jack-roller' of the neighbourhood. Against her family's wishes she develops a strong and sometimes uncomfortable attraction to him. Redi herself doesn't understand why she is drawn to Mabegzo and why, at eleven, she feels the way that she does for this man known to many as a menace. Then he too is found lying dead in a pool of blood, two years after the death of her father. Redi has to remind herself to stay sane. Endings and Beginnings is Redi's quest to find out the truth about the circumstances surrounding her father's death. As an adult she visits his grave and decides to find the people that killed her father and ask them why. She also goes on a quest to finally humanise Mabegzo who was hated and abhorred by so many when he was alive. She visits and speaks to his family, friends and neighbours and pieces together the life of this man who came fleetingly through her life but whose presence she would feel for a long time to come

The Upside of Down: How Chaos and Uncertainty Breed Opportunity in South Africa


Bruce Whitfield - 2020
    You are wasting your time.In a world of fake news, deep-fakes, manipulated feeds of information and divisive social-media agendas, it's easy to believe that our time is the most challenging in human history. It's just not true.It is a time of extraordinary opportunity. But only if you have the right mindset. Fear of the future breeds inaction and leads to strategic paralysis. We put off decisions until we can have certainty. We look for signals. We wait. And while we do that, the world moves on around us.Problem-solvers thrive in chaotic and uncertain times because they act to change their future. Winners recognise that in a world of growing uncertainty, you need to resort to actions on things you can control.And the only things over which you have absolute control are your attitude and your mindset. These, in turn, determine the actions you will take and that will define your future.A robust mindset is the one common characteristic Bruce Whitfield has identified in two decades of interrogating how South Africa's billionaires and start-up mavericks think differently. They are not naive Pollyannas. They don't ignore risk or hope that problems will go away. They constantly measure, manage, consider and weigh up opportunities in a tumultuous sea of uncertainty and find ways around obstacles.If, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller suggests, the stories we tell affect economic outcomes, then we need to tell different stories amidst the noise and haste of a rapidly evolving world.

Picking Up The Brass


Eddy Nugent - 2006
    It follows Eddy Nugent, a bored fifteen-year-old, living in Manchester, as he travels through the drinking, swearing and sex-obsessed world of our nation's finest.

Bitches' Brew


Fred Khumalo - 2007
    Focusing on the epic love affair between a former amateur musician—who happens to be a bootlegger, mercenary, and killer—and a shebeen queen, this South African love story traces the couple's lives and loves through the interweaving of history and memory in the tradition of village storytellers.

When Saturday Mattered Most: The Last Golden Season of Army Football


Mark Beech - 2012
    That fall, the Black Knights of Army were the class of the nation. Mark Beech, a second-generation West Pointer, recounts this memorable and never-to-be-repeated season with:- Pete Dawkins, the Heisman Trophy winner who rose to the rank of Brigadier General - The long-reclusive Bill Carpenter, the fabled "lonesome end" who earned the Distinguished Service Cross for saving his company in Vietnam - Red Blaik, who led Army back to glory after the cribbing scandal and had the field at Michie Stadium named in his honorCombining the triumph of The Junction Boys with the heroics of The Long Gray Line, Beech captures a unique period in the history of football, the military, and mid-twentieth-century America.

Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius


Kwame Dawes - 2003
    He was a performer who held true to his religious and cultural heritage, yet he is still awarded the status of world rock star. Renowned poet and scholar Kwame Dawes analyses in detail what his actual verses and lyrics meant when matched against the social and political climate of the time and what it meant to be a black man in the modern world.

Lost Boys of Hannibal: Inside America's Largest Cave Search


John Wingate - 2017
    Three modern day Tom Sawyers, with no caving expertise but an abundance of bravado, made Hannibal ground zero for a terrifying calamity that would leave its traumatic mark for half a century. Joel Hoag, his brother Billy, and their friend Craig Dowell vanished after exploring a vast and complex maze cave system that had been exposed by highway construction. Fifty years later, their fate remains the ultimate unsolved mystery.

The Diary of a Forty-Niner


Chauncey L. Canfield - 1906
    The Gold Rush had begun.300,000 gold-seekers left their homes, grabbed what they could and headed West to find their fortune.This is the diary of one of those intrepid men, and the trials and tribulations that he faces in his search for riches. From May 1850 through to June 1852 the life of Alfred T. Jackson, one of the forty-niners, was compiled by Chauncey Canfield. Jackson’s dream was that “I would like to have enough capital so that I would not have to slave from sunrise till dark as I did on dad's farm.” But like many others who moved out west to find gold it was not easy … He lived a truly wild existence during his time in the west, sleeping rough, panning for gold and fleeing from gunfights with his dog and his best friend. First-hand accounts of early settlements like Nevada City and Rock Creek are given as well as descriptions of Grass Valley, the Sierra Mountains and the North and South Yuba Valleys. It is a rich and vivid depiction of gold mining with accounts of pioneer travelling overland, the infiltration of foreign workers, particularly Chinese miners, and contains many details of how forty-niners like Jackson entertained themselves with the nuggets that they found and spent. First published in 1906, this classic work provides a thorough insight into the real wild west and the life of the forty-niners. Chauncey Canfield (1843-1909) first published The diary of a forty-niner in 1906. Albion Press is an imprint of Endeavour Press, the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

A Change of Tongue


Antjie Krog - 2003
    What does this metamorphosis entail and in what ways are we affected by it? How do we live through it and what may we become on our journey toward each other, particularly when the space and places from which we depart are - at least on the surface - so vastly different?Ranging freely and often wittily across many terrains, this brave book by one of South Africa's foremost writers and poets provides a unique and compelling discourse on living creatively in Africa today.

9/11 Ordinary People: Extraordinary Heroes


Will G. Merrill Jr. - 2011
    

Reluctant Pioneer: How I Survived Five Years in the Canadian Bush


Thomas Osborne - 1995
    The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents with axes and boats, and narrow escapes from wolves and bears. Many years later, after returning to the United States, Osborne wrote down all his adventures in a graphic memoir that has become, in the words of author and journalist Roy MacGregor, "an undiscovered Canadian classic."Reluctant Pioneer provides a brooding sense of adventure and un- sentimental realism to deliver a powerful account of pioneer life where tragedies arrive as naturally as rain and where humour resides in irony.