Download or read book Chris van Wyk Irascible Genius written by Kevin van Wyk and published by Pan Macmillan South africa. This book was released on 2024-07-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When he died in 2014, author Chris van Wyk left behind an impressive literary legacy. The scope of his work was broad – poetry, children’s books, short stories and biographies. But perhaps he is best remembered for his memoir Shirley, Goodness & Mercy, which chronicles his growing up in Riverlea and introduces us to the colourful characters who helped to shape his life and inform the stories he wrote. The public persona of this witty and wise raconteur was well known, but behind it was a family man, who liked nothing better than to spend time with his two sons Kevin and Karl, his wife and childhood sweetheart Kathy, and the friends and family who were his primary sources of inspiration. Using the unique vantage point of oldest son, Kevin van Wyk’s astute observations of his father and the strong bond they enjoyed throughout Chris’s life have resulted in a memoir that is as affectionate as it is entertaining. In taking us behind the scenes into the Van Wyk household, we witness the inner workings of the mind of a storyteller, from the flowering of his father’s activism, wit and wisdom to the sources of his occasional quirky outbursts. If storytelling runs in the genes, Kevin may just be proof that his father’s spirit lives on.
Download or read book Chris Van Wyk Irascible Genius written by Kevin Van Wyk and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When he died in 2014, author Chris van Wyk left behind an impressive literary legacy. The scope of his work was broad - poetry, children's books, short stories and biographies. But perhaps he is best remembered for his memoir Shirley, Goodness & Mercy, which chronicles his growing up in Riverlea and introduces us to the colourful characters who helped to shape his life and inform the stories he wrote.The public persona of this witty and wise raconteur was well known, but behind it was a family man, who liked nothing better than to spend time with his two sons Kevin and Karl, his wife and childhood sweetheart Kathy, and the friends and family who were his primary sources of inspiration. Using the unique vantage point of oldest son, Kevin van Wyk's astute observations of his father and the strong bond they enjoyed throughout Chris's life have resulted in a memoir that is as affectionate as it is entertaining. In taking us behind the scenes into the Van Wyk household, we witness the inner workings of the mind of a storyteller, from the flowering of his father's activism, wit and wisdom to the sources of his occasional quirky outbursts. If storytelling runs in the genes, Kevin may just be proof that his father's spirit lives on."--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Piggy Boy s Blues written by Nakhane Toure and published by Blackbird Books. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nakhane Toure's debut novel, Piggy Boy's Blues, is for all intents and purposes a portrait of the M. family. Centred mostly on the protagonist, Davide M., and his return to Alice the town of his birth, the novel portrays a Xhosa royal family past its prime and glory. Davide's journey, from the city to pastoral Alice for peace and quiet, is not what he or the characters living in the forgotten and dilapidated house have bargained for. His return disturbs and troubles the silence and day-to-day practices that his uncle, Ndimphiwe, and the man he lives with have kept, resulting in a series of tragic events. Set mostly in the Eastern Cape (modern and historical) - in Alice and Port Elizabeth, Piggy Boy's Blues is a novel about boundaries, the intricacies of love and how the members of the M. family sometimes fail at navigating them.
Download or read book Listen to Your Footsteps written by Kojo Baffoe and published by Pan MacMillan. This book was released on 2021-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Those who know Kojo would have known what to expect in Listen to Your Footsteps a deeply personal, authentic and equally intellectual journey of a quintessential African. A storyteller for the ages, every word and anecdote is like being alone with him in a quiet place as he narrates what it takes to be a real man, doting father, loving son, devoted friend and committed partner. - THEBE IKALAFENG, founder and principal at Africa Brand Leadership Academy 'An insightful memoir of Kojo growing up, navigating family and figuring out his contribution to the world that reads as a beautiful ode to his father. With every word he writes there is a sense of responsibility to leave the world better than he found it. A true wordsmith; the landscape of his memories dances on the page.' - TUMI MORAKE, comedian and author of And then Mama Said Kojo Baffoe embodies what it is to be a contemporary African man. Of Ghanaian and German heritage, he was raised in Lesotho and moved to South Africa at the age of 27. Forever curious, Kojo has the enviable ability to simultaneously experience moments intimately and engage people (and their views) sincerely, while remaining detached enough to think through his experiences critically. He has earned a reputation as a thinker, someone who lives outside the box and free of the labels that society seeks to place on us. Listen to Your Footsteps is an honest and, at times, raw collection of essays from a son, a father, a husband, a brother and a man deeply committed to doing the internal work. Kojo reflects on losing his mother as a toddler, being raised by his father, forming an identity, living as an immigrant, his tussles with substance abuse, as well as his experiences of fatherhood, marriage and making a career in a fickle industry. He gives an extended glimpse into the experiences that make boys become men, and the battles that make men discover what they are made of, all the while questioning what it means to be 'a man'.
Download or read book Like Water is for Fish written by Garth Japhet and published by Pan Macmillan South africa. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soul City and Soul Buddyz series are memorable for the way in which they integrated health topics into compelling storylines on TV, radio and in print, creating stories so popular that they entertained and informed millions of people. And the Heartlines’ ‘What’s Your Story?’ programme and films such as Beyond the River, continue to provide witness to the transformative power of story. As a young boy, Garth Japhet found his life radically shaped by the Jungle Doctor series of books. The stories so enthralled him that, against all advice, he set his heart on medicine. He could see his future – with a backdrop of savannas, golden sunsets, adventure and accolades – as a romantic figure, a healer, a hero. This fantasy sustained Garth through the challenges of medical training, but finally he arrived. He was Dr Japhet, living the dream. Except the dream was a nightmare. The reality of medicine was not the life he had hoped for. There were times when he cursed the power of the story that had so completely messed up his life. Having struggled with anxiety most of his life, he was catapulted into a deep depression. And then it happened. Garth stumbled upon the healing power of story – fictional, factual and his own. What magic was at work here? If stories had changed him, could he use story to change others? This question set him on the journey described in Like Water is for Fish; a journey that led to Garth co-founding Soul City and Heartlines, and to an understanding that story, in its multiple forms, is as essential for our lives as water is for fish. When you share your story with others and they share theirs with you, barriers break down, hardened attitudes shift, and healing begins.
Download or read book The Girl who Wanted to be an Actress written by Chris Van Wyk and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is part of a series of stories featuring a group of friends who have all sorts of exciting adventures. Suitable for the intermediate phase, the stories are written at different levels of ability.
Download or read book Shirley Goodness and Mercy written by Chris van Wyk and published by Pan Macmillan South africa. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shirley, Goodness & Mercy is a heart-warming, yet compellingly honest story about a young boy growing up in Newclare, Coronationville and Riverlea during the apartheid era. Despite Van Wyk’s later becoming involved in the ‘struggle’, this is not a book about racial politics. Instead, it is a delightful account of one boy’s special relationship with the relatives, friends and neighbours who made up his community, and of the important coping role laughter and humour played during the years he spent in bleak and dusty townships. In Shirley, Goodness & Mercy Chris van Wyk – poet, novelist and short story writer – had created a truly remarkable work, at once both thought-provoking and vastly entertaining.
Download or read book Blood Trail written by Tony Park and published by Ingwe Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poacher vanishes, two young girls go missing, a tourist disappears... magic or murder? Evil is at play in a South African game reserve. A poacher vanishes into thin air, defying logic and baffling ace tracker Mia Greenaway. Meanwhile Captain Sannie van Rensburg, still reeling from a personal tragedy, is investigating the disappearance of two young girls who locals fear have been abducted for use in sinister traditional medicine practices. But poachers are also employing witchcraft, paying healers for potions they believe will make them invisible and bulletproof. When a tourist goes missing, Mia and Sannie must work together to confront their own demons and challenge everything they believe, and to follow a bloody trail that seems to vanish at every turn.
Download or read book My Bombay Kitchen written by Niloufer Ichaporia King and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-06-18 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book published in the United States on Parsi food written by a Parsi, this beautiful volume includes 165 recipes and makes one of India's most remarkable regional cuisines accessible to Westerners. In an intimate narrative rich with personal experience, the author leads readers into a world of new ideas, tastes, ingredients, and techniques.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Photography 3 Volume Set written by Lynne Warren and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-11-15 with total page 1823 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography explores the vast international scope of twentieth-century photography and explains that history with a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary manner. This unique approach covers the aesthetic history of photography as an evolving art and documentary form, while also recognizing it as a developing technology and cultural force. This Encyclopedia presents the important developments, movements, photographers, photographic institutions, and theoretical aspects of the field along with information about equipment, techniques, and practical applications of photography. To bring this history alive for the reader, the set is illustrated in black and white throughout, and each volume contains a color plate section. A useful glossary of terms is also included.
Download or read book Welcome to My Studio written by Helen Van Wyk and published by . This book was released on 2003-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using paintings and sketches created over the years of her life as an artist, Van Wyk provides all the instruction and examples oil painters need to understand the effect of background on color; the seven components of pictorial expression; how to paint glass, eyes and expressions; and so much more.
Download or read book Round About Bradford written by William Cudworth and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Mission of Malice written by Erika Bornman and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1980s, Erika Bornman’s family join, and ultimately move, to KwaSizabantu, a Christian mission based in KwaZulu-Natal, which is touted as a nirvana, founded on egalitarian values. But something sinister lurks beneath ‘the place where people are helped’. Life at KwaSizabantu is hard. Christianity is used to justify harsh punishments and congregants are forced to repent for their sins. Threats of physical violence ensure adherence to stringent rules. Parents are pitted against children. Friendships are discouraged. Isolated and alone, Erika lives in constant fear of eternal damnation. At 16, her grooming at the hands of a senior mission counsellor begins. For the next five years, KwaSizabantu wages emotional, psychological and sexual warfare on her, until, finally, she manages to break free and escape at the age of 21. Escaping a restrictive religious community is difficult, but rehabilitation into ‘normal’ life after a decade of ritual humiliation, brainwashing and abuse is much more painful, as Erika soon discovers. She cannot ignore her knowledge of the grievous human-rights abuses being committed at KwaSizabantu, and so she embarks on a quest to expose the atrocities. Mission of Malice – My Exodus from KwaSizabantu chronicles Erika’s journey from a fearful young girl to a fierce activist determined to do whatever it takes to save future generations and find personal redemption and self-acceptance.
Download or read book A Certain Idea of France written by Julian Jackson and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2018-06-18 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH, NEW STATESMAN, SPECTATOR, FINANCIAL TIMES, TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Masterly ... awesome reading ... an outstanding biography' Max Hastings, Sunday Times The definitive biography of the greatest French statesman of modern times In six weeks in the early summer of 1940, France was over-run by German troops and quickly surrendered. The French government of Marshal Pétain sued for peace and signed an armistice. One little-known junior French general, refusing to accept defeat, made his way to England. On 18 June he spoke to his compatriots over the BBC, urging them to rally to him in London. 'Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.' At that moment, Charles de Gaulle entered into history. For the rest of the war, de Gaulle frequently bit the hand that fed him. He insisted on being treated as the true embodiment of France, and quarrelled violently with Churchill and Roosevelt. He was prickly, stubborn, aloof and self-contained. But through sheer force of personality and bloody-mindedness he managed to have France recognised as one of the victorious Allies, occupying its own zone in defeated Germany. For ten years after 1958 he was President of France's Fifth Republic, which he created and which endures to this day. His pursuit of 'a certain idea of France' challenged American hegemony, took France out of NATO and twice vetoed British entry into the European Community. His controversial decolonization of Algeria brought France to the brink of civil war and provoked several assassination attempts. Julian Jackson's magnificent biography reveals this the life of this titanic figure as never before. It draws on a vast range of published and unpublished memoirs and documents - including the recently opened de Gaulle archives - to show how de Gaulle achieved so much during the War when his resources were so astonishingly few, and how, as President, he put a medium-rank power at the centre of world affairs. No previous biography has depicted his paradoxes so vividly. Much of French politics since his death has been about his legacy, and he remains by far the greatest French leader since Napoleon.
Download or read book The Things that Could Not be Said written by Frank Chikane and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under President Thabo Mbeki, the presidency came in for a great deal of criticism for its handling of various matters.
Download or read book Eggs to Lay Chickens to Hatch written by Chris van Wyk and published by Pan Macmillan South africa. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agnes, the Van Wyks’ Zulu housekeeper, had a special friendship with young Chris in the late sixties to early seventies. He would defend her whenever she came to work with a hangover on a Monday morning and made a mess of the cleaning. In turn, Agnes never told on Chris when he played truant from school. As the years passed, the two grew closer, swopping stories about coloureds and Zulus, life in Riverlea and Soweto, pass laws, politics and falling in love. She taught him to count in Zulu and he promised to teach her to read in English. Whenever the clock ran against her, Agnes would stop almost in mid-sentence, grab a broom or cloth, and declare: ‘I have to rush. I have eggs to lay, chickens to hatch.’ What an odd, ungrammatical thing to say, Chris often mused. But many years later, he played a CD by Louis Jordan, a 1940s American jazz singer, and it all became clear. Eggs to lay, chickens to hatch (forthcoming end April 2010) is Chris van Wyk’s second childhood memoir about growing up in Riverlea and his colourful interactions with the men and women who lived the African proverb that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. But mostly it is the story of a wonderful friendship between a young coloured boy and a Zulu woman.
Download or read book Ghosts of the Past written by Tony Park and published by Tony Park. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A forgotten African war. A missing treasure worth killing for. German South West Africa 1906, Australian horse trader Cyril Blake is executed in cold blood by the Kaiser’s soldiers. Sydney, the present day. Blake’s great-great nephew, recently widowed Nick Eatwell, is approached by South African journalist Susan Vidler who is investigating his ancestor’s mysterious demise. Intrigued and looking for distraction, Nick discovers a long-lost manuscript which tells how Blake stayed in South Africa after serving in the Anglo Boer War and joined the Nama people in their rebellion against the Germans in South West Africa, modern-day Namibia. In Munich, historian Anja Berghoff, researching the origin of the wild ‘ghost’ horses of Namibia, stumbles across intriguing letters from Irish-German spy Claire Martin, with whom Blake had an affair. As Nick and Anja’s paths cross, they find themselves racing through southern Africa and time on the trail of a legend. But they’re not alone. Someone else is chasing these ghosts of the past, looking for clues to a hidden treasure worth killing for. Ghosts of the Past is based on a true story.
