Reviewed: legendary lensman Jurgen Schadeberg's memoir

The Way I See It – a memoir, by Jürgen Schadeberg

YOU know the picture of Nelson Mandela gazing through the bars of his prison cell on Robben Island? Jürgen Schadeberg took it. The picture of Miriam Makeba in her tight dress in front of a microphone? Jürgen Schadeberg took it. In South Africa his work is mostly associated with Drum magazine where he was chief photographer and picture editor in the 1950s, and he photographed the likes of Can Themba, Todd Matshikiza, Nelson Mandela with Ruth First at the ANC conference in 1951, the Sharpeville funerals.

But before he was a photographer here he worked in his native Germany, having grown up in Berlin during World War II, hiding in bomb shelters and witnessing the effects of the Nazi regime. He has taught photography in the US and London, taken some 200 000 pictures, and now lives in Spain.

The Late Show, by Michael Connelly (Orion Books/ Jonathan Ball)

AWARD-winning Michael Connelly is probably the US’s top crime fiction author, whose books have been translated into 39 languages.

His work has featured Los Angeles Police Department detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch and criminal defence attorney Mickey Haller.

In The Late Show he introduces a new detective, Renée Ballard. She used to be a young hot shot with the LAPD, but now she works the “late show”, the graveyard shift. She knows LA can be tough, especially in the dead of night, but this night is particularly bad: a nasty assault and a multiple murder with no suspect. The toughness of LA is no fiction – this thriller is dedicated to Sergeant Steve Owen of the LA County Sheriff ’s Department, who was “executed, shot through the badge, October 5 2016”.

One Life at a Time, by Daniel Baxter (Picador Africa)

DR DANIEL Baxter was full of enthusiasm when he left a community health centre in New York in 2002 to go to Botswana and join Africa’s first HIV/Aids treatment programme.

He discovered very soon he had had no idea what he was in for. But his experiences of Botswana’s people, their optimism and faith in the face of appalling poverty and illness, changed Baxter and how he thought of his role as a doctor.

In his preface he says he went to Botswana thinking he had nothing substantial to learn. But Africa, he writes, both punctured his arrogance and gave him solace.