Paul Kruger - A Biography by Johannes Meintjes

Paul Kruger - A Biography by Johannes Meintjes

Published: Cassell, London, 1974 1st Edition.

Edition: First Edition

ISBN 0 304 29423 3

Publisher's red hardcover binding with dust jacket.

ix + 295pp. Illustrated with photographs. 

Previous owners name on the front endpaper. Binding solid. Dust jacket in very good condition.

'President Paul Kruger spent his youth in frontier country, trekking, hunting game, and establishing and defending a farmstead in the Transvaal. He was hardy, individualistic, self-assertive, a religious dogmatist. His formal education was limited to an assiduous reading of the Old Testament (much of which he knew by heart) and his strength was such that he could lift a loaded wagon. He was a typical Boer, but even in such a remarkable community he was outstanding: a brilliant commando leader and a tireless politician, his rise to the presidency of the Transvaal in 1883 was unstoppable, and thereafter he fought a protracted diplomatic battle to maintain his country's independence which culminated in the outbreak of the second Boer War.

Paul Kruger has been the subject of both vilification and idolatry, but Johannes Meintjes has set out in his years of research to extract "the man as a personality from a veritable bog of hostility and sentiment, prejudice and deification". The result is this important biography of a massively forceful figure, a colossus driven by a love of his people and a single-minded, obsessive sense of divine mission, a giant on the world stage, almost superhuman in intelligence and energy.'

Jacket Condition: Very Good
Binding Condition: Very Good
Overall Condition: Very Good