ALL his life, Ambrose Zephyr has been fascinated by alphabets, especially geographical ones.
As a boy he would write the names of exotic places in fancy script, and write to embassies and consulates asking for brochures, maps and pamphlets.
He would also tell his parents that he could see things – like the Statue of Liberty from Lands End, or ancient kings at war on a battlefield.
At the age of 50 (married but childless) he is told by his doctor that he has only a month to live.
The only thing on his mind now is to undertake a trip through the alphabet to places he has dreamed about (some of which he has visited): Amsterdam, Berlin, Chartres, Deauville, Elba, Florence, Gizeh.
Well, his wife, Zappora Ashkenazi (known as Zipper), persuades him to stay in Paris rather than go to Elba, and after Gizeh they have to give Haifa a miss and go straight on to Istanbul.
But now his illness is catching up on him. Back to London, and his letter J becomes Old Jewry. His L is Leicester Square.
Can he get to his childhood favourite, Zanzibar (with two Zs and two As)?
Or will it end with Zipper?

THE title of this volume of short stories, placed above an unsignposted fork in a gravel road in the bewildering Knersvlakte, is ironic.
But its light-hearted humour also conceals the tragedy of an abortion.
Wicomb, in one of the later stories, tells her mother: “Ma, it’s just stories” – but they are based on her own life.
She recalls her childhood as the daughter of a Knersvlakte school teacher, her train journeys to Malmesbury, then to Cape Town, for her schooling, then the brand new University of the Western Cape.
She looks back on her decision to leave South Africa for good, but also on visits home in later years.
A few stories involve other personalities – the Knersvlakte woman who cooks in the UWC canteen, the shepherd Skitterboud who is abandoned by his wife. But most are personal – one of them so intimately so that I felt embarrassed for her.
The stories are finely crafted, and have received acclaim for this – while this is their first publication in South Africa, they were released overseas in 1987.
But they resonated for me because they also speak of a region intimately familiar to me.
I could almost smell the aroma of the Van Rhynsdorp trading store, and her trip up the Gifberge brought to mind my own visits to this magical world of fynbos, overlooking the dry, dry plain with its extremely salty water.

REMEMBER when you were a kid, and had all sorts of adventures in “faraway lands”?
Cornelia, her sister Maude and their pal Zwelabo find a way to visit the Kingdom of Gamagion – the land of those who love children – by whirling the globe Mr Button keeps in his study.
They find that they are honoured guests at a feast, and the girls are recognised as the children of Gordon and Glory, who were there 30 years ago with Gordon’s sister Hilda.
Aunty Hilda has never lost touch with her childhood, unlike Mrs Button, who can’t remember a thing, and Mr Button, who is constantly travelling the world looking for a special place.
The three children have an important task to fulfil in Gamagion, but they can only go there at weekends, because during the week they have to be at school.
And even when they do go, they are called back just when things get exciting by their mother or Aunty Hilda.
Called back, that is, to Bez Valley – Bulbring is a South African, and the Buttons’ home is in her home town, Johannesburg.
Maude, aged nine, is a typical South African kid, as are Cornelia, 11, and Zweli (or Zwelabo Zed, as they call him in Gamagion).
Can they save Gamagion? And can they find Aunty Hilda’s winning lottery ticket?

This book was one I eventually got around to reading because it had such a tremendous reputation. All sorts of people recommended it. But I was shattered to find that although it was written by a leading pastor, it had absolutely nothing to say about faith in Jesus Christ. Everything it puts forward relies solely on individual human beings being positive.
While this seems to be sound advice, it actually has nothing to say to the shattered soul, and makes a god out of ordinary humanity.
Far from being the best book I have ever read, I would say that this is one of the most misleading and dangerous.

WHILE Molly Moon is new to me, Byng has already published three novels about her for younger readers.
Molly can hypnotise people, and also time-travel, and having discovered that she had a twin brother, kidnapped at birth, she resolves to travel back in time to the moment of his kidnapping.
This starts her off on a fresh adventure, travelling forward in time by 500 years.
In this world, global warming has rendered the British Isles Siberian, and Italy has become part of the Sahara.
And it is on Mont Blanc that Molly finds her brother, Micky, a hypnotist in the household of a six-year-old princess.
It is a household mostly of children – who are these children, and how did they gain control of this country on the desert’s edge?
Share the adventures of Molly, her friend Rocky and Petula the pug in a zoo made up of part-human creatures, controlled by a 10-year-old professor.

Crooks contends that all religion on earth can be traced back to a supernova explosion in the vicinity of Proxima Centauri some 6 000 years ago.
Comparing religious and historical records from around the world, he notices common phenomena, and comes to the conclusion that the supernova shone more brightly than the sun for about 30 years.
He also argues that a plasma tongue released by the supernova was seen travelling through space, taking 30 years to reach Earth. On arriving in our atmosphere, he says, in places it burned everything in sight (including whole civilisations), while in other places it took the form of a cloud, and precipitated carbohydrates.
The plasma tongue, he contends, is the origin of stories in various cultures that tell of dragons.
The evidence he has gathered from many sources argues strongly for the acceptance of his thesis, as well as his contention that this was the spark that inspired religious activity among human beings.
While I find this an acceptable argument when it comes to pagan religions, I have serious doubts that it is applicable to Judaism or to Christianity.
It does, however, provide a worldwide answer to many problems facing the historian of religions and the anthropologist.

This book may be a concise account of the Church’s history, but it displays such a strong anti-Roman bias that when it was prescribed by the theology faculty at the University of South Africa, there were protests against it, and another book had to be prescribed instead.
As a Protestant I have no axe to grind on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church, but I object to mean-minded Protestant extremism, whether Calvinistic or of any other bent.

Far-fetched nonsense – literally so, since it postulates a planet from beyond the orbit of Pluto that once in a few millennia reaches towards the sun and comes close to Earth. If that isn’t sufficiently far-fetched, God and the angels came from that planet to make slaves of mankind.
Please!

The upside-down South African flag on the cover says it all: this is not a great book of limericks at all. It is a shoddy collection of bias and prejudice against any part of South Africa that is not part of Gauteng – and folk from the outer reaches of Gauteng won’t like it either, since it is also prejudiced against “foreigners” from Pretoria, Brakpan and places further from Johannesburg. Hardly surprising – they were all submitted to Clarke’s column in The Star, Stoep Talk.

A post-1994 supplement (published in January 1995) to Brownell’s magisterial National and Provincial Symbols, this book carries the full detail of the current national flag (devised in 1993 by Brownell and adopted in 1994), including construction charts, and the national anthem (incorporating Die Stem van Suid-Afrika and Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika), with full sheet music.
The old national coat of arms, which continued in use until 2000, is shown, as are photographs of President Nelson Mandela and his deputies, F W de Klerk and Thabo Mbeki.