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Defying the Odds |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Judith E. Chettle |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 3/1/1994 |
| Size: 2,029 Words, 12,892 Characters |
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IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS
A South African Memoir
Helen Suzman
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993
304 pp., $25.00
South Africa has always been a country of paradoxes, a place that regularly confounds the conventional wisdom of friend and foe alike. It is here, for example, that an Afrikaner like Breyten Breytenbach could be exiled for his politics but receive prestigious prizes from the government for his poetry, and a hard-line conservative white like neo-Nazi Eugene Terreblanche could ally himself with black Chief Gatsha Buthelezi. Not least of South Africa's paradoxes has been the political career of noted antiapartheid warrior Helen Suzman.
A woman in a congenitally male chauvinist society, a Jew in a predominantly Christian country, and for many years the only elected member of her political party, Suzman became not only the internationally respected voice for the often voiceless, but also a parliamentarian admired by men as diverse as Nelson Mandela and H.J. Klopper, the hard-line Nationalist speaker of the house. A woman who fought what even her most loyal supporters thought were futile battles, she has now been gloriously vindicated. All such paradoxes are addressed in her recently published memoirs.
In No Uncertain Terms is not only an inspiriting c...
Read Full Article
...lives a magnificent battle against apartheid." And it does so with humor, good sense, and a refreshing, even old-fashioned, zest for politics and principle.
In No Uncertain Terms recounts the battles from the trenches of a lone warrior who, like the warhorse in the Book of Job, did not turn back from the sword but instead fearlessly went out to fight the battle that needed to be fought.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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