Under The Harrow: Lives Of White South Africans Today By Suzanne Gordon
Under The Harrow: Lives Of White South Africans Today By Suzanne Gordon
Hardcover
ISBN 0434302473
Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd 1988 First Edition.
Used - Very Good+. This book is in very good condition. The Dust Jacket has some very limited signs of wear and the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. The book is protected with a Cellophane cover. Tanning/Browning of pages.
This collage of white South Africans (which follows Gordon’s parallel book of interviews with black domestic servants) evokes real people against a rich succession of backdrops. Gordon’s extraordinary sense of South African locale infuses her characters’ personae and stories, conveying the material comfort and energetic sense of striving many of them share. It is doubtful that a group characterized by almost universal good humor and realized ambition is typical, but they are undoubtedly quite variegated politically. For most of them, however, the current approach to black-white relations of F. W. de Klerk goes to the margin of political acceptability-or far beyond. The beauty and comfort of their lives could all be swept away.
In this enlightening book, the South African writer Suzanne Gordon explores the experience of white South Africans today through a series of candid and fascinating personal histories. Suzanne Gordon travelled widely in search of her subjects, from her own native Johannesburg to the Eastern Cape, from Mafeking to Pietermaritzburg. She talked in depth to both English and Afrikaans-speaking families, to those on the right and on the left, to doctors, teachers, farmers, politicians, students and businessmen. She talked to Sue, a doctor working among poor whites in the southern suburbs and who also helps to run a service caring for released detainees; to an Afrikaner factory owner in the lowveld who trades with black South Africans but refuses to worship with them - 'You must draw the line some-where'; to a genteel 87-year-old survivor of a British concentration camp and to a sugar farmer and Rhodes scholar from Natal.
