100 books like Scholarly Scoundrel

This is a heavy tome, but it is really compelling reading for a history buff like me. Hughes tells the story of the British colonisation of the continent we now know as Australia by focusing on details, details, details—and people! This is not a dry academic book taking the reader through a timeline. Instead, I like its focus on the people at the basis of this brutal period in the history of Australia, associated with huge human costs—both for the convicts forcibly transported half a world away and for the Indigenous population.

Hughes is a storyteller, and he does engage in some speculation, but overall, his facts hold up, and so this book is a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in how modern Australia developed over the past 250 years. 

In early times, during the European colonisation of the East Indies (the Spice Islands), the various East India companies would closely follow the African shoreline on their way north and east from the Cape of Good Hope. This turned out to be slow going, and so when the Dutch discovered the ‘Brouwer route,’ following the roaring forties before turning north some distance before hitting the Australian coast, their passage could be shortened by at least a month. The main problem of those early navigators was to decide when to turn north before running into the Western Australian coast. Many ships, and many Dutch ships in particular, misjudged their longitude and so ran into coastal shallows and shipwrecked.

The waters just off the Western Australian coast cover numerous early shipwrecks, with Dutch shipwrecks being particularly well represented. As an avid maritime history enthusiast with Dutch roots, this book is right up… show more.

In early Australian colonial times, the colony in New South Wales was short of hard currency. Rations of pretty much everything were tight, and life was tough. To provide some measure of relief, rum rations were issued to the local population, even to convicts, which soon led to a vibrant underground trade in rum as an alternate currency. The illegal rum trade was monopolised by the colony's military officers to the extent that none of the early governors could even make any dent in curbing the practice.

I love this book, as Matt Murphy vividly describes many of the outrageous incidents associated with the illegal rum trade, the substance abuse, and the wide-ranging consequences. A colourful character himself, he focuses on the people who bring his stories alive—many of them colourful and irreverent. I find history told through the stories of people most compelling. The book goes beyond the historical… show more.

Matthew Flinders is an Australian hero but less well-known elsewhere. He was, ultimately, the person who gave Australia its name when the continent was more generally known as New Holland. He is most famous for his circumnavigation of the continent in H.M.S. Investigator in 1801–1803. Together with his younger brother, Samuel Ward Flinders, they undertook a monumental effort to map the Australian coastline and obtain careful latitude and longitude determinations. I am particularly intrigued by these significant feats in the face of serious adversity.

I, therefore, loved that Miriam Estensen goes deep into Matthew Flinders' persona in this thoroughly researched biography. She paints him not just as an important historical figure but as a man with all his flaws and vulnerabilities. This is perhaps the most extensive and most easily accessible biography of a figure who was larger than life in his own time and who continues to inspire generations… show more.

The late Nick Wood, a science fiction writer, clinical psychologist, former journalist, humanitarian, and anti-apartheid activist born in Zambia and raised in South Africa, was always learning.

This is reflected in all his writing, including most of the stories in his collection. Largely science fiction stories in a variety of settings: from post-apocalyptic worlds, settled moons, and climate-changed earths, these stories are highly focused on the social and environmental aspects of humanity even in the most science fictional scenarios.

These stories, intersectional, emotionally resonant, exciting, thoughtful, and varied. Learning Monkey and Crocodile is a wonderful way to sample some of South Africa’s interesting science fiction corpus from a voice that has now left us, but which will not be forgotten.

Swart makes a big argument: studying horses changes how we understand all history. This sweeping overview shows that “The history of horses is the history of the desire for power” whether economic, political, military, social, or cultural. The history of horses in South Africa offers an interesting comparison with both the American West and the American South in terms of frontiers, the military, race, class, and gender. Swart is a lively, funny, and entertaining writer. The fieldwork she did for this book gives the reader a visceral sense of what South Africa is like as a place. What is there not to love about a book with chapter titles like “The Reins of Power” and “The Empire Rides Back?”

While I was a graduate student of writing, I devoured every novel and story by Nadine Gordimer, whose body of work is astounding in how it combines artistic sensibility with a moral vision. Most important, Gordimer, with her unflinching and unrelenting gaze at the horror of apartheid in South Africa, taught me the value of passion in writing. Gordimer is known mostly for her novels, but her short stories are equally sharp and biting in their critique, and she uses the form’s precision to devastating effect. What is striking in Jump and Other Stories is the diversity of her characters and situations, thereby illuminating every corner of the racial injustices in her country.  

This book has been timely as policymakers in the carbon-intensive economy of South Africa is in the throes of a developing framework and plan for implementing a just transition to a low carbon economy.

It brings some of the best thinkers and doers in science, policy and academia to unpack the key shifts – social, economic, and technological and builds on thinking in earlier works on transitions.

This novel is set in the beautiful, moody rainforests of South Africa’s Garden Route and captures the period of gold rush, ivory hunting, and logging at the end of the 19th century. The hero, Saul Barnard, is increasingly disturbed by the destruction of the ancient forest by miners, hunters, and woodcutters, and develops a relationship with one of the region’s reclusive elephants. It’s a novel that not only celebrates this wild corner of South Africa, but is an implicit cry for its conservation. I have spent time camping and hiking in those forests and have developed a love for their leafy embrace.

It's not an easy read, but I read this one and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road back-to-back. These are two books about lost souls walking away from something, not knowing where they’re going.

Michael K is another character who invokes more sympathy/pity than admiration. Sometimes, I didn’t overly care about Michael K’s suffering, feeling he’d brought it on himself. Mostly, though, I wanted him to find his simple peace.

JM Coetzee is such a good writer. His sparse but full sentences always deliver something.