Robert M. (shotokanchef) reviewed on 5/7/2009 + 813 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

If you missed Cry, the Beloved Country and Too Late the Phalarope read these first! Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful, which is betwixt a novel and non-fiction, documents the attempts of the Afrikaners to solidify apartheid during the period 1952-1958. It is written eloquently narrated in part by a subordinate government official who, through letters to his aunt, sets the flow of the storyboth novel and documentary. Some elements mirror, or adapt, the style of Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer and The USA Trilogy. The title emanates from exclamations of casual travelers who observe merely the beauty of a locale without seeing the elemental discord within the environment. It reminds me of my own travels through the southern states in early 1962. My group marveled at the quiet splendor of one of our stopover pointsSelma, AL. The author clearly brings out the conflicts of those years in South Africa; a period that was to become a change agent for equality.

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