Title: History Matters
Author: Bill Nasson
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Penguin Books
Cape Town, South Africa 2016
ISBN 9781776090273 / ISBN 978-1-77609-027-3
Hardcover, dustjacket, 16 x 24 cm, 286 pages
History Matters is a brilliant blend of essays, reviews and reflections. War heroes, imperial cricket matches, Karoo martyrs and vanished movie-houses, all are part of Bill Nasson's wider world. In an age of amnesia, Nasson's history matters more than ever, seeing where we come from shows us who we are. History Matters is an eloquent selection of writings over four decades by Bill Nasson, one of South Africa’s most popular and highly respected historians. The pieces in this compendium are lively and entertaining, written with wit, humour and a finely tuned sense of irony. The book cover the Anglo-Boer War, the two World Wars, cricket, District Six, schooldays and education, Spike Lee, Hollywood and history, Mandela and other political biographies, and a great many other topics. Resembling a pudding of spicy plums, this is a perfect book for anyone interested in South Africa and its history, and in a broader appreciation of tweaking the tail of life in the past.
Foreword
Preface
A HISTORICAL EDUCATION
The school magazine
Ben Kies: A tiger of non-racism and non-collaboration, 1917-1979
RO Dudley: Teacher, educator and political dissenter, 1924-2009
Livingstone I presume, but not that Doctor: A school memoir, 1966-1970
History's surprise daffodil
A SOUTH AFRICAN WAR
Tommy Atkins in South Africa
The war of Abraham Esau, 1899-1901: Martyrdom,
myth and folk memory in Calvinia
BOOKS
Coarseness, consumption and consternation in
the early colonial Cape
Alfred Milner: Britain's busiest German import
Beyond a Matjiesfontein boundary
Not quite fair play, old chap: The complexion of cricket
and sport in South Africa
WORLD WARS
A war of South African succession? A deluded dominion
and its African Great War
'Unbalanced emotionalism' or republican romance:
The 1916 Easter Rising in South African eyes
A flying Springbok of wartime British skies:
AG 'Sailor' Malan
MORE BOOKS
Fording the Amazon
What did Lord Halifax say to Lord Keynes?
I braai, therefore I am
Life beyond satnav
Loving that letterbox
SOCIAL HISTORIES
'She preferred living in a cave with Harry the snake-catcher':
Popular leisure and class relations in District Six, c 1920S-1950S
Legend of the fall: The Luxurama
The priest, the chapel and the repentant landowner:
Abraham Esau revisited
HISTORIANS
The hearse of history
Remembering Stanley Trapido, 1933-2008
EVEN MORE BOOKS
On another trek too, and not where you would have expected
The was, the is, and the might-have-been:
Political leadership in post-apartheid South Africa
FILM
A Whiteout': Malcolm X in South Africa
'The Deal': Gladstone, Disraeli and a South African
historian in the court of King Hollywood
ODDS AND ENDS
Maki Saki
History's fractured cobblestones
After the book-burning
Wine and festivals
A few favourite quotes
Index