BOOKMARKS
LEAP IN Alexandra Heminsley Loot.co.za (R231) Windmill Books
ALEXANDRA Heminsley’s first book, Running Like A Girl, was a funny, candid account of how she took up marathon running.
Having moved to Brighton, she spent five years without dipping into the sea, taking the plunge on her wedding morning.
Her relationship with swimming had a problematic start: when she and her new husband took a dip, his wedding ring fell into the waves, lost forever.
Alexandra signed up for a course in open-water swimming, got stuck half-way into her wetsuit and found herself sobbing on her first training swim.
Alongside this she records another, sadder, narrative: her failure to conceive by IVF. Part memoir, part motivational manual, this offers encouragement to anyone who follows her into the water.
THE MESMERIST Wendy Moore Loot.co.za (R328) W&N
DR JOHN Elliotson was an innovative and humane physician who rose from modest beginnings to become Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at London University.
Elliotson challenged the 19th century medical establishment with its often injurious practices, pioneering the use of the stethoscope and championing remedies such as iodine and quinine. By his mid-40s he was a celebrated society doctor when he encountered the phenomenon of mesmerism –putting patients into a trance. Elliotson embraced the practice but quickly turned it into showmanship – his demonstrations with two young female patients verged on the sadistic.
This readable book charts the rise and fall of a brilliant doctor with a fatal flaw.
I MUST BELONG SOMEWHERE Jonathan Dean Loot.co.za (R291) W&N
JOURNALIST Jonathan Dean is the grandson and great-grandson of refugees.
His great-grandfather, David, fled from Russia to Germany, where he was blinded while fighting in World War I.
He trained as a lawyer and was held in the Theresienstadt concentration camp by the Nazis.
He sent his sons, Heinz and Rudi, to England to escape the same fate and, on his release, resumed his legal practice in Vienna.
Heinz, Jonathan’s grandfather, married an Englishwoman and became, his second wife remarked, “so English that at his funeral, his neighbours were astonished to learn that he had spent the first 16 years of his life in Austria”.
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THE LONG FORGOTTEN David Whitehouse Loot.co.za (R231) Picador
WHAT makes us, us? Our parents, our pasts, our memories? The questions that this novel poses are intriguing, but get somewhat lost amid the weirdness of its time-warping plot.
The “long forgotten” of the title is a plane, missing for 30 years until its black box turns up in the belly of an ill-fortuned whale. And with it, a flood of memories resurface.
Memory is also an issue for London ambulance call dispatcher Dove. An orphan, his early years are a blank, though he’s sure his uncontrollable temper is an unwelcome genetic inheritance.
Lately, however, Dove has had flashbacks – the twist being that it’s not his own past he remembers, but that of New Yorker Peter Manyweathers in the eighties.