• My first pick is The History of the World, a giant volume by Frank Welsh, published by Quercus. The book is a joy to handle.
The beautiful cover invites you to step inside, where magnificent pictures reproduced on high-quality paper stimulate interest, so that the reader naturally turns to the text to find out more.
The range is breathtaking, as the author sets out to guide his readers “from the dawn of humanity to the modern age”. Well, that takes some doing and, almost inevitably, error creeps in, as when the siege of Rorke’s Drift is placed before Isandlhwana, instead of after.
I’m not aware of any other lapses, but in a record covering so many centuries and dealing even-handedly with the West and the East, it would not be surprising if some did occur.
The History of the World is astonishingly low-priced at R294.95, and any recipient of it would have much cause to be grateful to you.
• Visually, the most stunning of my selection is Evocative Africa: Ventures of Discovery, with photographs by Gerald Cubitt and text by Benni Hotz.
This large-format volume, published by Clifton Publications in Cape Town, lives up to the promise of its title, as the beautiful pictures of an acclaimed photographer really do evoke the splendour and the mystery of sub-Saharan Africa; you feel like a discoverer, seeing the new with wonder and the familiar as if for the first time.
The book is nearly perfect in its kind, and yet a note of caution is necessary. The market for coffee-table books is highly competitive and while the occasional error of spelling or punctuation can be over-|looked, lapses of a more serious nature cannot. It is unacceptable that a book published in post-apartheid South Africa can still give any credence to the discredited and reactionary notion that Great Zimbabwe may have been built “by Indians who sailed here in cata-marans using favourable monsoon trade winds”.
This said, Evocative Africa is still highly recommended as a magnificent photographic collection, excellently presented. Given the quality of the book, it is value for money at R499.
• Third in line is a very different book. Power is a collection of photographs of world leaders by |the renowned photographer Platon. Handsomely published by Wild Dog Press, the book comprises 200 pages of powerful, full-page portraits, followed by a section that outlines the political biographies of the leaders featured.
The pictures are powerful because Platon so successfully makes the cliché of the camera not lying come true. Technical skill would not be enough to get the camera to see through the image that these much-photographed men and women would like to project. It is the artist’s interaction with his subjects that has them relaxing their guard sufficiently for the truth to emerge.
A long quotation from David Remnick’s introduction says it all: “Platon’s Gaddafi is surreal, grotesque, as if he’s been transported from a barstool in Star Wars; Mugabe… casts his thuggish scowl at the camera…
“The portrait of the Russian leader Vladimir Putin reveals him for all his steely arrogance; this is the face of the prototypical officer of the Soviet secret services. Like a silent-movie actor, Silvio Berlusconi of Italy delivers his lascivious leer on cue.”
South Africans will turn to Platon’s portrayal of Jacob Zuma with great interest and, as they study his features and those of all the other leaders, they will come to appreciate the sheer genius of the photographer. Power will cost you R240 and it is guaranteed to go down well.
• My final choice is another impressive coffee-table book, Jewish Memories of Mandela, published by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, with text by David Saks.
The title of the book is self-explanatory. It seeks to chronicle the close association of South African Jewish people with Nelson Mandela throughout his political career. Despite the candidly acknowledged fact that before 1990, the main-stream leadership of South African Jewry opted for non-involvement in political affairs, Jewish people played a key role in Mandela’s early life as a lawyer in Joburg and a disproportionately large role in |the anti-apartheid struggle.
Jewish Memories of Mandela is a handsome, richly illustrated tribute to a great man and to some of the many men and women who were privileged to |share part of |his life journey. |In its pages we encounter familiar names like Sydney Kentridge, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Albie Sachs, Helen Suzman, Nadine Gordimer, Raymond Ackerman, Gill Marcus and many more.
R450 is not a lot for this excellent book – with its added advantage of being an attractive collector’s piece for those interested in Judaica or Mandeliana.