EBR April Local non-fiction

How the three independent asset managers Coronation, Allan Gray and Investec (later Ninety One) , dubbed the CIA, came to dominate and continue to dominate the South African asset management industry, particularly the pension fund market.There are plenty of colourful big ego personalities such as Hendrik du Toit at Ninety-One, Leon Campher at Coronation and the late Allan Gray plus kingmakers reshaping the industry such as Patrice Motsepe.

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Following her bestsellers Saving a Stranger’s Life and Holding My Breath, One Call Away invites you to join Dr Anne Biccard on the front lines in the emergency department of a busy Johannesburg hospital. You’ll meet the Eye-roller, the Clothes peg, the Hairbrush and the Crackling Malaprop. Mostly though, you’ll be exhilarated as Anne and her team battle to snatch patients back from their main adversary, the Grim Reaper. Dentures and daggers, acid and aneurysms – it’s all in a day’s work for Dr Anne and the emergency team. Back home at the farm, the roller-coaster ride continues with the famous band of rescued Snoopies, long walks and reflections. One Call Away asks big questions about life while acknowledging the joy and brevity of it all.

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I wanted to be who I felt I was. Broken. A wreck. Unloveable.’   There’s a moment where life happens. It’s the moment just before making a good decision, or a bad one. For Milton Schorr, just such a moment took place at the age of seventeen, when he found himself squatting on his haunches in a Cape Town flat with a heroin needle in his arm.   A friend sat with him, his thumb on the plunger, and a decision was to be made. Let the heroin slip inside, and take the road the drug offered, or turn away, and find a new life not defined by the endless quest for oblivion.   For Milton, the path was already set, as it had been at his first taste of shoplifting, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, Mandrax, LSD, Ecstasy and crack. In this memoir he details the life that led him to addiction, the wild and dark years of his drug use, his struggles to return to normality, and the reckoning with the self that ultimately led to his recovery.   Addict is a courageously honest account of Milton's life in active addiction and recovery. Today, two decades sober, he relates the pivotal points in his journey toward death, and back to life. This book is essential reading for anyone touched by addiction.

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‘That summer afternoon, I had no way of knowing the book would radically alter my existence. Yet that proved to be the case. A wind that had begun to blow from a faraway place a long time ago had finally caught up with me.’ So writes José Manuel de Prada-Samper about a chance discovery more than thirty years ago of an obscure book called Specimens of Bushman Folklore in a second-hand bookshop in England. Part historical detective story, part memoir, Fading Footprints traces the author’s journey into the magical folklore of the /xam hunter-gatherers of the Upper Karoo. Through archival research and on field trips in South Africa, De Prada-Samper reveals the tragic scope of the genocide of the /xam San by European colonisers. However, he is also able to humanise the /xam as he delves into the work of two Victorian researchers, who recorded the stories of San prisoners in Cape Town over more than a decade in the late 1800s. In seeking out the ancient folklore tales, the author learns that many are still told to this day by farm workers in forgotten corners of the Northern Cape and that, contrary to common belief, the culture and traditions of South Africa’s first people are still alive. Their footprints have not been erased.

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