Lobby Books:
New Arrival: The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Set in Stockett's native Mississippi in the early 19060s, this first novel adopts the complicated theme of blacks and whites living in a segregated American South. A century after the Emancipation Proclamation, black maids raised white children and ran households but were paid poorly, often had to use separate toilets from the family, and watched the children they cared for commit bigotry. In Stockett's narrative, Miss Skeeter, a young white woman, is a naive, aspiring writer who wants to create a series of interviews with local black maids. Even if they're published anonymously, the risk is great; still, Aibileen and Minny agree to participate. Tension pervades the novel as its events are told by these three memorable women. Is this an easy book to read? No, but it is surely worth reading. It may even stir things up as readers question their own discrimination and intolerance in the past and present.
New Arrival: Young Blood by Sifiso Mzobe
Sipho is a “young blood”, a young man caught up in a world of money, booze and greed. He lives in Umlazi, Durban – he is seventeen, has dropped out of school and helps out at his father’s mechanic shop during the day. But odd jobs underneath the bonnets of wrecked cars do not provide the lifestyle his friends have... A fascinating look into the emotional landscape of car hijackers – by a fantastic and vibrant new voice in South African literature.
New Arrival: The Life and Death of Democracy by John Keane
A distinguished political scientist takes a broad view of democracy, speculating on both the lineage and the prospects of a cherished doctrine. The author distinguishes numerous types of democracies, assembly and representative and, now, monitory - those born of movements to correct the ruling class on particular issues, such as civil rights for ethnic minorities. Provocatively, Keane extends the history of democracy beyond the walls of Athens, where, Western legend has it, the idea of rule by the demos, the people writ large, was born. He locates democratic ideas in ancient Syria and Mesopotamia, as well as Mycenae and other Mediterranean locales. Contradictions abound in those ideas: Can a slaveholding state such as Athens be democratic? Can Sparta, with impressed military service? Must a state be democratic to be prosperous? Keane's explorations should occasion some rethinking - on, for instance, the history of India, which shows the possibilities of multiethnic democracies, and of Islam, which has a neglected democratic tradition. The author also isolates desiderata for fulfilling "the humbling ideal of democracy," among them access to education, health care and livelihood - the sorts of things that champions of free-market democracy minimize as somehow socialistic.
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