By LISA WITEPSKI, BRUCE DENNILL & NIGEL WILLIS
In The Midst Of Wolves by Kurt Ellis
More by Greg L Hawkins
The Memory Of Water by JT Lawrence
Confidence Man: The Making Of Donald Trump And The Breaking Of America by Maggie Haberman
Black K Klansman: A Memoir by Ron Stallworth
‘Twist in the tale’ doesn’t even begin to describe the unexpected turns in this book. It’s a real cliffhanger, but it should come with a warning: if you’re reading it by yourself, you’ll definitely end up sleeping with the lights on. Nick Creed, former rising star of the FBI, has returned to South Africa under something of a cloud. With a personality as dark and twisty as the plot itself, he’s definitely something of an anti-hero. He comes up against a particularly tricky opponent when a young woman is dismembered in her Johannesburg flat – a murder that seems all the more heinous when all evidence to the involvement of supernatural forces. Witches, tokoloshes and monsters make for an unusual gallery of rogues and give In The Midst Of Wolves a uniquely local flavour. It’s brilliant. – LW
As well as being an experienced pastor, Greg Hawkins has also been a management consultant. He’s a man who likes a statistic, but also a guy who wants to understand why the statistic matters, and what can be done about it. This is a book designed to assist Christian readers in their efforts to make their relationship with God about more than simply doing things; about enjoying intimacy with Him instead. His stats support the need for such advice to be given, underlining the common dissatisfactions that believers have as well as the need to not place the responsibility for these issues at someone else’s door. Hawkins’ first-person writing style makes the journey he’s been (and is going) on easy to relate to, and the training and experience behind his insights is comforting. It’s gently encouraging stuff rather than being forceful in any way, but More is worth a read for the sense of being in a community of folks with similar challenges. – BD
From one perspective, The Memory Of Water could have been a relatively dry, thoughtful piece about a talented author who is finding it close to impossible to match his previous successes thanks to a more or less immovable case of writer’s block. That, broadly speaking, is a common enough theme. But JT Lawrence is a writer who enjoys not only adding a touch of mystery and a thrill to an otherwise traditional sequence of events but also throwing in elements of the supernatural to add layers and spice things up. Her protagonist here, Slade Harris, is a profoundly unlikeable person, overwhelmingly aware of his own gifts and led in every direction by his ego, often to the exclusion of his intellect. He feels that a likely way to solve his inspiration issues is to live a life packed with such excess that he simply can’t fail to have exciting, exotic experiences worth writing about, which will save him having to invent too much. The stage is set for a plunge through Harris’s life and some of the extremely weird experiences he stumbles into. For South African readers, the references to recognisable local landmarks and suburbs adds a familiarity that grounds the apparently paranormal parts of the story. “Apparently” is an apposite term, as Lawrence never overcooks those aspects of the books, building up to powerful twists late in the day. There are a couple of moments when a turn taken by the story seems a touch odd, but everything is brought together well by the book’s end. – BD
Donald Trump is an extraordinary phenomenon. He defies belief but almost half of American adults believe in him. He is a liar of magnitude, a serial tax evader, a man whose first presidency left his country more divided than ever in its history. Trump’s attitude towards NATO may have lulled Russian President Vladimir Putin into a belief that he could invade the Ukraine with impunity. Trump chose to ignore the emphatic advice of Barrack Obama about the pernicious danger posed to the world by North Korea. Contemptuous of the poorer countries of the world, reckless in his disregard for the environment, a person whose true business accomplishments have been slender indeed, he is a person of minimal intellectual accomplishment, having limited curiosity about the world. He is cynical in the extreme. He is routinely vulgar and crude in his language. A sexist, dogged by rumours of sleaze, and his ‘trophy bride’, Melania, declined to move into the White House when he became president. Although Melania was born and grew up as a Slovene, Trump would repeatedly beats the xenophobian drums. That such a person could have risen to the presidency of the United States of America deserves rigorous analysis. The author of Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman, is a journalist who joined The New York Times in 2015. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on the investigations into Trump’s connections with Russia. She has twice been a member of a team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, in 2021 for reporting on the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus, and in 2022 for coverage related to the riot at the Capitol in January 2021. She has previously worked at The New York Post and The New York Daily News. Haberman has followed Trump’s career since reporting on his dabbling in politics and commerce in New York in the 1970s and 80s. She is probably the person best equipped to inform us about him. Her mastery of detail is meticulous to the point of tediousness. The banality of Trump’s misdeeds is boring. Trump grew up as the son of a reasonably successful, politically well-connected, property developer in Queens, New York. His father was a thug and a bully and treated Trump accordingly. Trump grew up without much experience of love from his father. The Biblical admonition that the consequences of the sins of the fathers live on for four generations seems vindicated in any psychological profile of Donald Trump. A narcissist, he craves attention and glories in the prospect of ‘stardom’. The title of the book tells us much about Haberman’s principal thesis about Trump: he a is a confidence trickster of extraordinary brazenness. He disregards the truth to invent stories that are preposterous in their untruthfulness. He is a contemporary embodiment of Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels’ theory that the bigger the lie, the more easily people will believe in it. Trump’s outstanding attribute has been that of a ‘confidence man’. A slightly more dated colloquial expression of the same concept is that of a ‘con artist’. Haberman documents the ‘cons’ with meticulous detail. During the 2016 presidential campaign, through his outrageous claims, he was repeatedly able to draw attention to himself and away from his opponent Hillary Clinton. The strategy worked. His election as president was one of the biggest contemporary political upsets in the democratic world, surprising almost all well-informed political observers. Haberman concedes that the truth about Trump is that ‘ultimately almost no one really knows him’. Does anyone? Haberman diagnoses Trump as malignant. Haberman suggests that the phenomenon of Trump’s grip on political power may be traced to the social and political changes that occurred in America – and especially New York and Washington DC – in the wake of the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. Undoubtedly, public confidence in political institutions in the USA has been eroded since then. Nevertheless, the truth about the parade of falsehoods swirling about in the world today may be attributable to the fact that the technology by which news is disseminated around the world has changed vastly within a generation. Consequently, the way in which we engage with political dialogue around the world has become massively flawed. Serious analysis, rooted in shared moral values is ‘out.’ Sloganised answers are ‘in’. We face political, economic and social issues of extraordinary complexity. It is easier for almost everyone to reduce the political choices we face to ‘binary code’. Instead of holding fast to the large truth of our shared humanity, we divide the world into ‘them and us’, the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad’, the politically savvy and the idiots, the morally superior and the backward. We are all partially to blame. Someone like Trump reduces the complexities of the world to ‘soundbite choices’. His lies are believed because they are vivid, the junk food of political enquiry. – NW
An account of the true events on which the entertaining Spike Lee film of the same name was based, Black K Klansman is a book with an astonishing central event, but without material of similar impact to flesh out the story the whole way through. What happened – and what could not be ignored as the basis for a potential film script – was Stallworth’s infiltration, as a black detective, of the Klu Klux Klan set-up in his native Colorado Springs. This was possible because of the timing, before cell phones and the internet, when keeping your identity private was relatively easier. The tale highlights the banality of the day-to-day realities of the Klan, which helps to loosen the hold they have over the psyche of some of the individuals involved here, while never minimising the hatefulness of what the organisation hopes to achieve. But Stallworth is a career detective, not an author, and his writing style features some of the dryness that is likely a part of his police paperwork, which is effective at best, but never really stimulating. This is an instance in which it may actually be better to just watch the movie… – BD