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  "PageContent": "<h3>The Books Page | Book reviews and news</h3>Some gorgeous, contemplative, interesting and utterly readable books have landed on my desk in the past few weeks, and a brief description of them makes a fitting end to The Books Page for 2025. The whole family is arriving for Christmas, some from Australia, two from the UK, and I know from experience not much reading gets done. So I wish all followers of The Books Page a blessed Christmas, a fabulous holiday season, and a wonderful, healthy and happy new year. Regular weekly reviews will resume on January 11(unless inspiration strikes before then!) – Vivien HorlerA Guide to Wild Swimming in the Western Cape – Explore 101 of the region’s most beautiful swimming spots, by Serai Dowling &amp; Matthew Dowling (Rockhopper Books)Serai Dowling, author of the bestseller A Guide to Tidal Pools of the Western Cape, and her husband Matthew have expanded the concept of the first book to include more general gorgeous places to swim, from sea coves and beaches to rivers, mountain pools and even dams.Like the first book the text is accompanied by glorious photographs designed to get you out into nature.  And even if you’re not lucky enough to live in the Western Cape, you can exult in the places the Dowlings uncover from the comfort of your armchair, and start planning your holiday.The authors point out that wild swimming is not to be confused with adventure swimming or “open water” swimming, although they can overlap. Wild swimming takes place in beautiful spots and allows the swimmer to embrace the joy of natural waters and serene places.Adventure swimming tends to push the swimmer, mentally and physically through challenging environments, while “open water” swimming tends to be competitive with a set distance and speed.On the other hand, the experience of wild swimming “lies in soaking yourself in a fully living ecosystem exposed to wind, weather, water creatures, shifting light and the contours of the land. It means being vulnerable and attentive”.In her preface Serai Dowling says her swims represent “rituals of connection to land, to history… I have witnessed how wild swimming can soften grief, build community and restore a sense of wholeness”.Dining with Elephants: French cuisine. African journey. Wild Inspiration, by Francoise Malby-AnthonyFrancoise Malby-Anthony is the widow of the conservationist and best-selling author Lawrence Anthony (author of The Elephant Whisperer), and they founded the glorious Tula Tula wildlife reserve in KwaZulu-Natal in 1998.Malby-Anthony continues to run the reserve today, surrounded by the (usually) gentle giants that both husband and wife have written about before.This new volume is part memoir, part cookbook and part celebration of living close to nature, or as Malby-Anthony puts it – “we live with nature, not on top of it. This cookbook is a celebration… of the elephants. Of the wild. Of the food.”Malby-Anthony may have been born in France, with its rich culinary heritage, but this book goes further, to celebrate great food with an African twist. And things are not easy, since Tula-Tula is in the bush, 25km from the nearest supermarket.Breakfast offerings include scrambled eggs and biltong on potato rosti, as well as pumpkin and Malva pudding rusks. Soups include exotic fruit gazpacho with Amarula, and chilled tomato and basil soup with avocado sorbet.There are splendid entrees, seafood recipes, cassoulets and sweets that, judging from the pictures, are to die for.And interspersed among all this are stories about life at Tula Tula, the day the matriarch elephant raided the boma, what happened to the vegetable and herb garden (elephants again), the wedding at which Malby-Anthony served what she thought was would dazzle the guests: crocodile vol-au-vents topped with a chocolate and chili sauce. The wedding MC described it as “memorable” and she adds: “I don’t think it was a compliment.”Then there was the time her chef confused habanero chillies with peppadews in the tomato soup.This looks like a delightful book.A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 – Fully revised and updated, by Bill Bryson (Doubleday)A shout from the Economist on the cover of this weighty tome says: “This book is possibly the best scientific primer ever published.”It turns out in the 20 years or so since version one was published, a lot has changed, and so the Short History has needed revision. For instance, this version explains to us why Pluto is no longer a planet; how the number of moons in the solar system has more than doubled in 20 years; how scientists have used advances in genetics to discover previously unknown species of early humans; why we still don’t know what most of the universe is made of; and how the little Biggs boson transformed physics.Bryson is an extraordinary writer who has never allowed himself to be typecast. The first Bryson book I owned was Troublesome Words, written when he was a lowly sub-editor on The Times of London.Then there were the hilarious travel books, of which my favourite remains Down Under, although Notes from a Small Island made me laugh out loud. Subsequent subjects have been science, the fascinating At Home, about the history of everyday objects in his home in Norfolk, and most recently The Body, an owner’s manual.He explains in his introduction to Secret History 2.0 how as an elementary school pupil in the US in the 1950s he was struck by a diagram of the planet Earth, which explained the various layers, from the crust to the upper and lower mantles, the liquid outer core and the burning hot inner core of iron and nickel.He remembers thinking, in wonder: “How do they know that?” He was to discover, in years of school science education, the answer to that question was rarely given.“How do they know what goes on inside an atom? And how, come to that…can scientists so often seem to know nearly everything but then still not be able to predict an earthquake or even tell us whether we should take an umbrella to the races next Wednesday?”So he has devoted five years of his life to finding out.This is one of Exclusive Books top reads for the summer holidays.Lessons from my Father, compiled by Steve Anderson &amp; Melinda Ferguson (Melinda Ferguson Books)Some South African leading lights have contributed to this book, all speaking of the importance of their fathers in their lives. They include Proteas cricket captain Temba Bavuma, former Springbok rugby coach Nick Mallett, Gift of the Givers founder Imtiaz Sooliman, author and publisher Joanne Hichens, Olympic gold medallist swimmer Chad le Clos and a score of others.In an introduction editor Steve Anderson says in a country where gender-based violence by men against women is rife, many people believe the lack of a supportive fatherly figure is a major contributing factor.This book looks at people whose fathers did play a supportive role, and what these fathers taught their children. Anderson writes: “My sincere hope … is that some of the many gems of good fathering on these pages will make a difference to even just one father, or father-to-be, and thereby to his family.”The first contribution I read was that by Temba Bavuma, partly because for years I worked with his father, Vuyo Bavuma, at the Cape Argus and Weekend Argus. Vuyo certainly had a way of coming up with great stories almost unheard of in what in those days were largely white newsrooms catering mainly to white readers.Temba says he’s often been asked if his dad helped helped in the development of his batting technique. No to that says Temba firmly, but in a wider sense Vuyo “taught me things that have benefited me enormously, not only in my cricket, but in my broader life”.He tells a story of how Vuyo taught him to deal with setbacks. Temba was playing for the Under 14A team at school and expected to be selected for the Gauteng Under 15 team. But when the team was announced, Temba’s name wasn’t called.He was devastated. He had had a good season and had made lots of runs. He writes: “It wasn’t hard to see that I was broken.”When father and son got home from the announcement, Vuyo handed his son a pen and paper and said: “Right, Temba, this is how we are going to go through this. Where do you think you can improve? In your batting, your fitness, your bowling, your fielding?”They went through the list, and Temba wrote down what had been identified. “Then we listed actionable steps as to how I could improve on each point I’d noticed.“I’ve become big on that approach: deal with the hardships; deal with the challenges. Try not to dwell on the emotional side of things, but rather plan and then focus on the practical aspects of how to move forward.”I was struck by both Temba and Nick Mallett’s fathers’ attitude to their wives.Temba writes: “Dad respects Mom’s views. If there’s an issue that has to be decided on, he doesn’t make a unilateral decision. It’s a collective ‘team’ process. In many families, especially in African culture, it’s most often the man who will consider the matter at hand and then make an ‘executive’ decision… My dad is very seldom like that.”Mallett, in his tribute to his father Anthony Mallett, wrote: “I’m going to wrap up my story about my father with what is the single, most significant aspect of the impact of Dad on my life. It is this: He absolutely adored our mother. So much of what I’ve been gifted in my 68 years is rooted in his unwavering love for my fantastic mom. From an early age, it was abundantly clear to us as children: Mom was Number One.”A few paragraphs later he writes: “Hs deep love for my mother gave me such a sense of stability…”This looks like a seriously interesting and moving book.Undone – Healing from botched cosmetic surgery: a memoir, by Michelle Roniak (Melinda Ferguson Books)The first thing I looked for when I opened this book was pictures. I mean, how badly botched was she? But there are none, except for one postage stamp-sized pic on the back cover, of an attractive blonde.Which is at odds with her story. From an early age she thought she was ugly. Or as she says in the first line of her preface: “Even before my botched cosmetic surgery, I lived with the deep conviction that I was a factory reject… I believed I was born defective, assembled from inferior parts… I morphed, obsessed, camouflaged, sliced, filled, injected and agonised.”She had a jaw correction, a boob job, botox and heaven knows what else. And then she made the fateful decision to have extensive liposuction and a labiaplasty.From the way she describes the results, she must have looked like a monster. Some time after the surgery her remaining fat started to migrate all over her body, to her neck, to her upper arms, to her breasts and to her thighs. The breasts, which reportedly grew several sizes virtually overnight, along with her thighs, were hideously painful.She was so unhappy, uncomfortable and distraught she wanted to die. She took cocaine, mushrooms, plenty of alcohol.In 2018, as a single woman aged 39, she even wrote to Dignitas, the Swiss organisation that provides doctor-assisted suicides, telling them she hated herself and strongly felt she could not go on living.But she said she wanted to go gracefully, and not cause further devastation to her family, adding: “Are there any options for someone in my situation or any resources you could recommend? I know this seems inhumane, but one way or another I am going to do this.”On the night of her planned suicide – after a farewell party with her friends, who of course didn’t know it was a farewell party – she confessed her plans to a former lover, and within hours she was in a psychiatric clinic.She discovered she was suffering from a mental condition called body dysmorphic disorder, “a preoccupation with perceived defects or flaws in one’s physical appearance that are barely, if at all, noticeable to the outside world”.With therapy and support, she became a physical hero, entering Iron Man competitions, swimming to Robben Island and completing the Comrades Marathon in 2025.She combs news and social media sources for information about people like her, but finds very little. A gynacologist she consults tells her: “The world really needs a story like this. Things are getting out of control regarding the unrealistic standards against which people are measuring themselves.”She writes that after her botched surgery she developed avoidance behaviours and emotional numbness that disconnected her from everyday life. “Unlike the victims of other traumatic experiences who receive sympathy, those suffering from botched procedures often face judgement: ‘You did this to yourself’.”There are days, she writes, when she feels the pull of old, destructive thought patterns. But now she has tools to deal with them –  meditation, communal support, writing and journalling and – above all – “sport that celebrates what my body can do rather than how it looks”.Red Tape – The untold story of a visionary South African’s battle against bureaucracy, and the birth of a world-renowned wine region, by Bridgid Hamilton Russell (Quickfox)If it weren’t for the surname of the author, this book’s title and cover would give barely any hint as to what it’s about: Tim Hamilton Russell’s heroic tilt at SA’s closed wine industry of the 1970s, dominated by monopolies, Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid-era control.Hamilton Russell, who has made Hemel-en-Aarde wines internationally famous, fought a courageous and ultimately successful battle against all sorts or reactionary forces including restrictive laws, industry boycotts and various court battles to prove Suth Africa could produce world class wines.In her author’s note Bridget Hamilton Russell, the late winemaker’s daughter, writes: “This memoir is an account of one man’s quest to break down barriers and cut through the red tape imposed on him by the regime of the day. It recounts his ambition to make the best wine in South Africa by farming particular noble grape varieties and adopting the proven winemaking techniques that had been used by the French for centuries. Once he had found a farm in a location that had never previously been considered as suitable for winemaking, he discovered that to pursue his ambition, be would be breaking a number of the country’s laws.”The Hemel-en-Aarde Valley – outside Hermanus – is now home to more than 20 wine producers, all making Burgundy-style wines that benefit from proximity to cool Atlantic breezes.What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)From the author of Atonement and On Chesil Beach, this novel explores how climate change can utterly upend life as we know it.It’s set in 2119, when Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs in the UK, part of Britain’s remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early 21st century, ie today, “captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith”.Vivien Blundy is the wife of Francis, a celebrated elderly poet. She had been an Oxford don, with potential to be made a professor, but after the death of her first husband and her marriage to Francis, she has become his secretary and housekeeper in a barn in rural Gloucestershire.At her 54th birthday he presents her with a poem he has written to her, A Corona for Vivien, but there appears only ever to have been one copy.Now Metcalfe is searching for this poem, only once read aloud at Vivien’s birthday and never heard again.It seems to have been a swansong for an English way of life before everything changed – before climate catastrophe and war – a symbol of all that has been lost.The cover blurb tells us this is at once “a quest, a literary thriller and a love story… a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost”.This is definitely my next read.This is one of Exclusive Books top reads for the summer holidays.Remain – A supernatural love story, by Nicholas Sparks with M Night Shyamalan (Sphere)Books about the supernatural are not my thing, even when they’re love stories, but this one does sound intriguing. Tate is a New York architect who heads off to Cape Cod to design a summer home for a friend.Tate has had a rough time lately – his beloved sister died, and he has been in a psychiatric clinic being treated for acute depression. He’s also uncomfortable about his sister’s deathbed announcement that she can see spirits who are still attached to the living world, because he doesn’t reallygoin for that sort of thing.At his Cape Cod bnb he meets Wren, a young woman with whom he forges an immediate connection. But not all in this charming little town is as delightful as it seems, and their blossoming relationship is threatened by various undercurrents. He decides he needs to unearth the truth about Wren’s past while there is still time.This novel is a collaboration between the author of love stories like The Notebook, and the writer and director of blockbuster thriller films like The Sixth Sense.",
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