Tito Mboweni

Why would a feisty almost-eighty-year-old grandmother slip into her Birkenstocks, throw a sleeping bag into the back of her Subaru, and set out across America? Because she'd had enough. Enough anger. Enough hatred. Enough division. Marilyn Siden has lived through much: the aftermath of World War II, Korea, and the horror of Vietnam. She's navigated good political administrations and struggling ones, a thriving economy and want. Her eight decades of experience living in the US have shown her the best America has to offer and, unfortunately, the worst. But she never thought America would become a place of vitriol and despair. So, she decided to do something about it. Through a series of epic journeys across America, Marilyn discovered what she was after: practical advice on how to help our nation heal. But she found something she wasn't expecting . . . something far more powerful. Marilyn found our common ground.

A New York Times 2016 Notable Book Robert Tombs’s momentous The English and Their History is both a startlingly fresh and a uniquely inclusive account of the people who have a claim to be the oldest nation in the world. The English first came into existence as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. They have lasted as a recognizable entity ever since, and their defining national institutions can be traced back to the earliest years of their history. The English have come a long way from those first precarious days of invasion and conquest, with many spectacular changes of fortune. Their political, economic and cultural contacts have left traces for good and ill across the world. This book describes their history and its meanings from their beginnings in the monasteries of Northumbria and the wetlands of Wessex to the cosmopolitan energy of today’s England. Robert Tombs draws out important threads running through the story, including participatory government, language, law, religion, the land and the sea, and ever-changing relations with other peoples. Not the least of these connections are the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it and yet been shaped by it. These diverse and sometimes conflicting understandings are an inherent part of their identity. Rather to their surprise, as ties within the United Kingdom loosen, the English are suddenly embarking on a new chapter. The English and Their History, the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century, and which incorporates a wealth of recent scholarship, presents a challenging modern account of this immense and continuing story, bringing out the strength and resilience of English government, the deep patterns of division and also the persistent capacity to come together in the face of danger.

Z Pallo Jordan has long been the unapologetic moral guardian of the liberation struggle. His writings spanning decades are testament to the power of putting pen to paper and speaking the truth with forceful and eminently readable moral conviction. Letters to my Comrades is the ultimate collection of his piercing and yet embraceable thoughts and inquiries. This treasure trove of the writings of Jordan could not have been more timely in this critical – or should we say unfortunate – period of the promise that was the New Democratic Republic of South Africa, and published as it is on the eve of the African National Congress’s general elective congress in December 2017, and interestingly in the aftermath of the watershed municipal elections of 3 August 2016.