Archive for the ‘International’ Category
by Amanda on Oct 11th, 2011
Supernatural powers of the mind and body – from invisibility, bilocation and teleportation to levitation, suspended animation and fire-breathing – enthral and mystify believers.
A recent poll showed that 41 per cent of US citizens believe in extrasensory perception, while more than half of Britons believe in psychic powers. Where do these abilities come from? Who has these supernatural talents?
The Encyclopedia of Paranormal Powers is an expert reference guide to these mystical abilities. Discover the secrets of mind readers, mediums, astral projectors and many others with similar powers. Delve into the supernatural with this complete, and fascinating, guide.
About the author
Brian Haughton was born in Birmingham, England, and is an author and researcher on the subjects of supernatural folklore and ancient and sacred places. He is a graduate of the universities of Nottingham and Birmingham, and has worked on archaeological projects in England and Greece. He has written several books on the subject of paranormal activity.
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by Amanda on Oct 4th, 2011
From gunpowder to Viagra, many of the greatest eureka moments in human history were chance discoveries that led to world-changing inventions and ideas.
Accidental Genius takes the reader on a tour of the scientific and technological advancements where leaps of faith, unexpected inspiration and sudden shifts of understanding brought about overnight changes in our perception of the world.
Celebrating the accidental Einsteins whose moments of inspiration changed the world, this book covers the work of familiar figures such as Isaac Newton and Louis Pasteur, but also reveals unsung heroes like the inventors of safety glass, Teflon, batteries and the radio.
About the author
Richard Gaughan is a research engineer whose decades of experience in the aerospace industry and US National Laboratories has provided him intimate familiarity with the role of chance observation in technological development.
He has written hundreds of articles covering subjects as diverse as the creation of antimatter, quantum teleportation, space telescopes, solid state lighting and advanced medical imaging methods. This is his first book.
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by Amanda on May 20th, 2011
Tim Butcher, author of Chasing the Devil, spent a week exploring Lesotho. Butcher says if you took away the warmth of the sun and the 600-foot waterfall, you could just as easily have been on Rannoch Moor in Argyll:
The track left fields that had been regimented by South African farmers and switchbacked its way skywards up the Drakensberg escarpment to the very different, wilder country of Lesotho. Up here there was no big game, no dry savannah nor tropical forest, but the biggest skies you will ever see and a giddying sense of standing on the roof of the continent.
I spent a week exploring this fascinatingly untypical African country, hiking across its vast sprung-mattress tundra of grasslands framed by rocky outcrops and studded only occasionally by the rondavel dwellings of Basotho people. Take away the warmth of the African sun and I could have been on Rannoch Moor in Argyll.
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by Amanda on Feb 11th, 2011
When Tim Butcher became the Daily Telegraph‘s correspondent for South Africa, he decided to go on a journey following the Congo River, just like Henry Stanley did when he was correspondent for the same newspaper in 1876.
In a BBC Radio 4 podcast, a group of readers ask Butcher about the travel book based on his Congo experience, titled Blood River:
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by Ben - Editor on Jan 12th, 2011
Michele Magwood’s Magwood & Twigg Book Salon kicks of 2011 with a chat with Chasing the Devil author Tim Butcher.
The book tracks Butcher’s journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia – a 350 mile trek that follows a trail blazed by Graham Greene in 1935 and immortalised in the travel classic Journey Without Maps.
Don’t miss this adventurer-author in conversation with interviewer extraordinaire Michele Magwood. Booking essential!
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by Amanda on Nov 29th, 2010
The Sunday Times books editor wants to know what went into the making of Chasing the Devil:
How did this idea of following Graham Greene’s journey through Sierra Leone and Liberia come about?
I had a troubled relationship with Sierra Leone and Liberia because I went there as a journalist from here (South Africa) covering it from 2001 to 2003, lost a couple of friends there and had a death threat put on me by Charles Taylor in 2003.
There isn’t a tradition of Liberian authors or Sierra Leone authors but weirdly there’s Graham Greene, this great literary figure who goes there when he is 30. He has great success with his first novel, but four books in he’s literally struggling to put food on the table and he has a young child so what does he do? He goes and gets a commission for nonfiction, and that’s helpful because you get guaranteed money upfront.
Back in the 1930s it was quite a cool thing to do. Evelyn Waugh was doing it here in Africa, Peter Fleming was doing it elsewhere, and others were doing it in the Middle East. He goes with a woman, like any man there’s a woman behind you, but in Greene’s case there’s a woman astride, a woman behind, a woman in every corner. He was an amazing bloke; he could barely keep his trousers on. So in 1935 he takes this woman with him, his cousin Barbara, and they both write books so I get two books – Journey without Maps and Land Benighted. They give me the fix point.
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by Amanda on Nov 23rd, 2010
Zebra Press and The Bay Bookshop invite you to the launch of Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit by Tim Butcher.
For many years Sierra Leone and Liberia have been to dangerous to travel through, bedeviled by a uniquely brutal form of violence from which sprang many of Africa’s cruellest contemporary icons – child soldiers, prisoner mutilation, blood diamonds. With their wars officially over, Tim Butcher sets out on a journey across both countries, trekking for 350 miles through remote rainforest and malarial swamps. Just as he followed H.M. Stanley through the Congo – a journey described as his bestseller Blood River – this time he pursues a trail blazed by Graham Greene in 1935 and immortalised in the travel classic Journey Without Maps in which he and his cousin Barbara were carried. Tim walks every blistering inch to gain an extraordinary ground-level view of a troubled and overlooked region.
As a journalist in Africa, Tim came to know both countries well although the wars made the trips to the jungle hinterland far too risky. This is where he now heads, exploring how rebel groups thrived in the bush for so long and whether the devil of war has truly been chased away.
Hear more of Butcher’s story: see you at the Bay Bookshop!
Event Details
- Date: Tuesday, 30 November 2010
- Time: 5:30 PM for 6:00 PM
- Venue: The Bay Bookshop
27 Somerset Road
cnr. Dixon Street
126 The Square, Level One
Cape Quarter
Green Point
Cape Town
- RSVP: capequarter@baybookshop.co.za, 021 421 1301
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by Amanda on Nov 22nd, 2010
The launch of Tim Butcher’s most recent book, Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit, was well received at Kalk Bay Books on an evening that was, coincidentally, the bookshop’s fourth anniversary.
Interviewer for the evening Donald Paul described Ann Donald’s shop as “a pool of sanity in our midst that keeps us going”. Hearty cheers rose from the audience, along with a toast courtesy the generously sponsored Leopard’s Leap wines.
Paul said that Butcher’s books (his first, the best-seller Blood River, was an account of his journey in the wake of the explorer HM Stanley) should be compulsory reading – in particular for those who blithely claim “I am an African” and wax lyrical about the “African Renaissance”.
Butcher, who traced the footsteps of Graham Greene in a bid to explore Sierra Leone and Liberia, did not have the entourage of 26 lackeys bearing hammocks, tins of golden syrup and crates of whisky that liberated Greene to gather limes by the wayside for his refreshment. (Greene’s account of his trip was published as Journey Without Maps.)
The author’s ideas on the apparently “humanitarian” move to relocate freed slaves from the UK to Sierra Leone shocked some. He maintained that it was little more than thinly veiled racism. “After the emancipation of the slaves, the locals in Manchester didn’t want black faces in Stockport!” he said.
Chasing the Devil contains a journey of 350 miles – a trek through remote rainforest and malarial swamps – and encounters with the merely devilish, more sinister types up to all kinds of devilry, and, indeed, possibly even the devil himself.
At Kalk Bay Books we had a sooty foretaste and wanted mouthfuls more. Don’t miss this riveting read!
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by Amanda on Nov 3rd, 2010
South Africa’s vast Great Karoo makes for an unusual setting for a book about Canada – but also proved the perfect place for Fred Stenson to develop his line of historical novels on his country’s emergence from a fur-trading outpost in the British empire to a player on the world stage.
The Great Karoo is the third in Stenson’s “economy-themed” novels on Canada, as he explained to Donald Paul at Kalk Bay Books last week, on the Cape leg of his SA book tour, which also saw him visit Johannesburg and – appropriately enough – the Richmond Boekbedonnerd festival in, where else, the Great Karoo.
While not exactly a trilogy, Stenson’s The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo follow a great historical sweep, from the early days of Canada’s colonisation (the “fur trade economy”), through the conquest of its western frontier (the “open range economy”), and onwards to adventure in other lands – an adventure predicated on the “homestead economy” that saw a settled people looking outwards in their efforts to define themselves.
Enter the Anglo-Boer War, which provided the perfect opportunity for Canadians to see a new part of the world – and serve their queen. “For a lot of these young men, it had to do with the thrill of the exploit,” said Stenson. “And that gave me a way to write about Canada without being in Canada.”
Here’s the author on one of the sources informing his novel:
The Great Karoo opens in 1899, as the British are trying to wrest control of the riches of South Africa from the Afrikaners. It follows Frank Adams, “a cowboy from Pincher Creek” who joins the Canadian Mounted Rifles, along with other young men from the ranches and towns nearby.
Marked by complexities of plot, subtleties of relationships, and the scale of the South African terrain where most of the action takes place, it’s an often exhilarating, sometimes gruesome book that presents the devastation occasioned by war in a new light for South African readers.
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by Amanda on Oct 18th, 2010
Zebra Press is delighted to invite you to the launches, in Johannesburg and Cape Town, of The Great Karoo by Canadian author Fred Stenson.
The Great Karoo begins in 1899, as the British are trying to wrest control of the riches of South Africa from the Boers, the Dutch farmers who claimed the land. The Boers have turned out to be more resilient than expected, so the British have sent a call to arms to their colonies — and an a great number of men from the Canadian prairies answer the call and join the Canadian Mounted Rifles: a unit in which they can use their own beloved horses. They assume their horses will be able to handle the desert terrain of the Great Karoo as readily as the plains of their homeland. Frank Adams, a cowboy from Pincher Creek, joins the Rifles, along with other young men from the ranches and towns nearby — a mix of cowboys and mounted policeman, who, for whatever reason, feel a desire to fight for the Empire in this far-off war.
Come meet the author at Love Books and Kalk Bay Books – we’ll see you there!
Event Details – Johannesburg
- Date: Tuesday, 26 October 2010
- Time: 6:00 PM for 6:30 PM
- Venue: Love Books
The Bamboo Centre
53 Rustenburg Road
Melville
Johannesburg | Map
- RSVP: info@lovebooks.co.za, 011 726 7408
Event Details – Cape Town
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