Don’t Panic by Alan Knott-Craig | Review by Leonie Smith
During the height of the power crisis in early 2008, Alan Knott-Craig, MD of iBurst, sent his co-workers an upbeat email encouraging them to keep going strong. That email spawned responses from South Africans all over the world as it made the rounds and struck a chord in patriotic souls everywhere. This book is a simple collection of some of those emails, expressing sentiments from a wide variety of South Africans: black and white, rich and poor, famous and unknown, immigrants and emigrants, spiritual and practical.
Each of the contributors finds some reason to love this country – and most move beyond the standard “we love the sunshine” line. The conclusion that most of the writers reach is that South Africa is better than many countries they’ve visited and that our problems can all be overcome with willpower, positive thoughts and hard work as a nation.
This is a quick, feel-good read and it certainly makes for a bright change on South African bookshelves when Joe Public seems to be full of gloom. Buy it, but lock your doors and stock up on candles anyway, because it will take far more than this little book to radically alter this country’s reality.
(Price R50.00, Penguin, ISBN 978-0-143-02579-5)