Illuminating Lives: Biographies of Fascinating People from South African History

by Penguin Random House South Africa

Overview

In this fresh and highly readable collection of South African biographical essays, a distinguished group of authors illuminate the lives of eleven colourful and complex men and women whose personal experiences throw fascinating light on the times in which they lived. The individuals whose stories are told here are very different in time, in place and in work and at play, but are united by an abundantly rich humanity and by the fascinatingly different ways in which they navigated their existence through the uneven waters of South Africa’s distant and more recent past. Including administrators and activists, sportsmen and teachers, a missionary, a pilot, a painter and a poet, Illuminating Lives is a wide-ranging and moving book which provides readers with striking and unexpected insights into history. Here are some intriguing South African lives well worth knowing about.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781776092659
Publisher:	Penguin Random House South Africa
Publication date:	09/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Vivian Bickford-Smith is an extraordinary professor in the History Department at Stellenbosch University. He has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century South African history, especially in the area of urban history and social identities. His publications include three books on the history of Cape Town; Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen; and, most recently, The Emergence of the South African Metropolis: Cities and Identities in the Twentieth Century (2016).
Bill Nasson is emeritus professor of history at Stellenbosch University. He has published widely on the historical experiences of war in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa and on a variety of other aspects of modern South African history. His most recent book is History Matters: Selected Writings, 1970–2016 (Penguin, 2016).