Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage

Jonny Steinberg

William Collins

<p>At the end of a steep gravel road in one of the remotest corners of South Africa's Eastern Cape lies the village of Ithanga. Home to a few hundred villagers, the majority of them unemployed, it is inconceivably poor. It is to here that award-winning author Jonny Steinberg travels to explore the lives of a community caught up in a battle to survive the ravages of the greatest plague of our times, the African AIDS epidemic. He befriends Sizwe, a young local man who refuses to be tested for Aids despite the existence of a well-run testing and anti-retroviral programme. It is his deep ambivalence, rooted in his deep sense of the cultural divide, that becomes the key to understanding the dynamics that thread their way through a complex and traditional rural community. As Steinberg grapples to get closer to finding answers that remain maddeningly just out of reach, he realizes that he must look within himself to unravel certain riddles.</p>

Three Letter Plague: A Young Man's Journey Through a Great Epidemic

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Vintage Books USA

Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City

<p>On Park Hill Avenue in New York City, almost everyone is Liberian. Many fled here, survivors of a brutal civil war that claimed the lives of one in fourteen Liberians. But even an ocean away, the baggage of the past is difficult to leave behind. Steinberg spent two years in this close-knit neighbourhood, tracing the tensions between two men, Rufus and Jacob, with very different pasts but goals which were locked into a collision course. As national dramas played out on a small stage thousands of miles from home, Steinberg takes up a remarkable story of a horrific and heart-wrenching war, and of the quest to be human in a world losing its humanity.</p>

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Vintage Books

A Man of Good Hope: One Man's Extraordinary Journey from Mogadishu to Tin Can Town

History

Africa

Vintage

On Park Hill Avenue in New York City, almost everyone is Liberian. Most people know one another; if not by name, then by face. And yet neighbours do not ask one another what they did in Liberia, for the question is considered an accusation. Many people here fled Liberia's brutal civil war, a conflict that claimed the lives of one in fourteen Liberians. The question of who is responsible is a bitter one. Jacob Massaquoi arrived on Park Hill Avenue in 2002 limping heavily. Before he had been there a week, a hundred stories abounded about his injury. By this time Rufus Arkoi was the acknowledged leader of New York's Liberians, a man who had sat out the war in America, but who harboured hopes of one day returning home to run for president. Within a year the two men were locked in a conflict that threatened to consume the community. The suspicions and accusations the residents had bottled up for years exploded at once. To observers it appeared that this enclave of exiles was frozen at the time of their flight, restarting a war that had ended back home. Jonny Steinberg spent two years in New York shadowing Rufus and Jacob, eventually journeying to Liberia to piece together their biographies from the people who once knew them. What emerges is a story of a horrific and heart-wrenching civil war, of a deeply troubled relationship between America and West Africa, of personal ambition wrestling with moral responsibility, of memory wrestling with forgetfulness and of the quest to be human in a world losing its humanity. Mixing history, reportage and a wealth of extraordinary personal stories Jonny Steinberg takes up the tale of a fractured African nation and its diaspora to remarkable effect. "Little Liberia" is a unique and important book, told with clarity and compassion, by one of our best and brightest young writers.

JONATHAN CAPE.

The Number: One Man's Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs

Jonathan Ball Pub.

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Books by Jonny Steinberg