Attenborough and the gang will shock you

In this week’s selection, Patricia McCracken reviews a book by nature’s most eloquent spokesperson on the precarious future of the planet, one about the gunrunners who armed South Africa’s gangs, a thrilling wartime naval adventure, and sadly, the late Lucinda Riley’s final novel in her best-selling Seven Sisters series.

A Life On Our Pla net by David Attenborough ( Witness Books, R427)

The UN recently launched its Decade of Ecological Restoration campaign, and whether you have doubts about its necessity or are already concerned about humanity’s impact on once-sustainable natural areas, Attenborough‘s ‘witness statement’ is still likely to shock you.

A Life On Our Planet is cast as a memoir, and Attenborough fondly remembers how he cycled as an 11-year-old from his home in the city to explore the countryside and its natural riches, especially fossils.

He recalls pioneering days of natural history TV, starting with his first series Zoo Quest, which took him to the jungles of Borneo and Guyana, and to the Serengeti plains.

Attenborough points out that today, by contrast, we cut down more than 15 billion trees a year, insect numbers have dropped by a quarter over the past 30 years, and wild animals account for just 4% of mammals on earth.

Give Us More Guns by Mark Shaw (Jonathan Ball, R290)

It was 2015 when one of the most prolific of modern gunrunners was revealed to be a police colonel, ‘recycling’ police firearms that had been upgraded, or guns that had been handed in under the amnesty.

Quelle surprise, state officials were fuelling crime instead of controlling it.

Shaw’s relentless threeyear research into tracing where those guns went, whom they reached, and how they were used focuses on a trail that circles the Cape Flats many times.

But it also goes further afield, not only in distance but in contacts, reaching all the way to KwaZuluNatal and former president Jacob Zuma’s taxi-boss nephew, for example, and to Norwood in Johannesburg.

Give us More Guns provides a detailed and disquieting picture of ‘how South Africa’s gangs were armed’ (as the subtitle says), which is sure to keep you awake at night.

The Cap e Ra ider by Justin Fox (Penguin, R290)

Jack Pembroke sometimes stumbles under a triple burden, which makes life hard for the newly appointed young commander of a Simon’s Town-based mining flotilla during the Second World War.

Personally, he is angry, grieving his mother’s death in the London blitz. Professionally, he’s suffering from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder, but was then seen as an embarrassing weakness.

Operationally, he’d be better in the desk job he’d agreed to when he transferred to Cape Town from England. But his domineering father, and admiral of the fleet, forces him back into battle.

Jack’s flotilla of four ships are converted whalers and trawlers crewed by merchant seamen, fishermen and novices.

He finds himself digging deep to develop leadership and track down a disguised Nazi raiding ship for a showdown in the freezing South Atlantic.

The Missing Sister by Lucinda Riley (Macmillan, R300)

Riley’s millions of fans are mourning her recent death after a four-year-long battle with cancer, but she left behind this 800-page account of how Merope, the long-lost sister of Pa Salt’s six treasured adopted daughters named after stars in the constellation of the Pleiades, was tracked down through New Zealand, Canada, France, England and Ireland.

Her identity is a surprise to everyone, and persuading her that she has a second family is almost as much of a challenge as finding her.

Riley wrote this during the 2020 lockdown, and while her local community’s help with reminiscences and oral history for background to the section set during the 1920s Irish Civil War makes it more emotionally than factually accurate, Riley’s plotting and empathetic characters will still have you turning every one of those 800 pages. McCracken is a features and investigative journalist.