South Africans may not have been as deeply affected by the terror of 11 September 2001 as Americans were, but you don’t have to be American to appreciate the full impact of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. You just have to be human.

While few novelists can tackle the subject of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre without overdoing it on the sentimental star-spangled patriotism, DeLillo writes with a living vocabulary and an insightful style that hurries along with the plot.

This book follows the story of an ordinary American family struggling to live in the aftermath of September 11, and includes unexpected glimpses of one of the terrorists’ lives as the attacks are carefully planned. The author is adept at capturing the small, seemingly insignificant details of daily life and throwing them into stark contrast against the horror and humanity of “9/11”.

Admittedly, a few parts of the novel can tend to lose the reader a bit in humdrum descriptions of the characters’ lives or fictional conversations that aim too high and leave too much unsaid. That said, the characters are mostly believable and the final section of the book (“In the Hudson Corridor”) is heart-wrenching and breathtaking.

(Price R115, Picador, ISBN 978-0-330-45224-3)

What an eerie book. McCarthy weaves a gripping tale of intrigue that moves forward rapidly, at times more rapidly than you’d like it to. Set in the modern-day “Wild West”, the novel leaves no time for suspense as Llewlyn Moss is hunted down after taking a briefcase full of cash from the bloody scene of a botched drug deal. A violent chase of cat-and-mouse between Moss and the sinister, soulless Anton Chigurgh ensues. In between this, McCarthy shares the rambling, poignant thoughts of Sheriff Bell, the man in whose county all these crimes are occurring.

Despite the high-voltage action and shocking twists in the plot, towards the end of the novel readers will realise that this is a book unlike any other. By the time you’ve reached the last page you’ll see that No Country For Old Men is not so much a story about whether the good guy or the bad guy wins in the end, as it is a comment on the sad and rapid decline of American society, morals and culture. A brilliant, haunting read.

(Price R115, Picador, ISBN 978-0-330-45453-7)

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)

By Bill Paccone • June 27, 2008

http://www.pressconnects.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080627/OPINION02/806270323/1005/OPINION

We easily recognize atrocious sentences such as this one: “How would you react if someone were to repeat and repeat himself repetitiously in the exact same way, over and over and again and again ad infinitum.” We recoil at such superfluity.
Yet redundancy, perhaps the most flagrant of all language solecisms, daily slips unhesitatingly into our language. Having become inured, we seldom notice it. Even professional journalists bombard us with redundancies.

All of the following phrases, recently culled from reputable publications, contain a redundancy. Can you spot them?

* I’ll go get the dinner.
* He lost by one single vote.
* They divided it up.
* It was catapulted forward 100 yards.
* Bronxville is a good place for children to grow up.
* Its history we don’t know about.
* The bombing shattered and cracked its every window.
* She tried to subtract 10 percent off.
* They traveled around for an entire year.
* They heard symphonies by 23 different composers.
* Where did you draw your inspiration from?
* The coalition of religious parties was cobbled together from formerly dissident groups.
* They infiltrated into the enemy’s ranks.
* He extended the time forward for them.
* Others advanced forward.
* They whittled away at the inventory.

Even the following short phrases are redundant: to build up; to filter out; eschewing the street vernacular; rice paddies (though the latter has become acceptable notwithstanding that the word “rice” is unnecessary).

Sometimes more than one word must be removed to negate the redundancy. Consider the following:

* Over half of the petroleum we consume is imported into the United States.
* We take it for granted that a baby, once born, will grow into adulthood.
* Not one more dollar of money should be spent trying to rectify the situation.

And from Bill O’ Reilly we recently read that “Carranza executed three college students in Newark by shooting them to death.”
I’m sure, too, you’ve encountered some of the following ways the word “down” has been redundantly employed: the sun shining down; the rain falling down; narrowing down the possibilities; descending down the tribal route; shrinking the design down; tamping down; dwindling down; winnowing down; whittling down; simplifying things down; condemning it all down.

And so too with the word “away”:

* Obama shifted the conversation away from the subjects of race and gender.
* He marched away from his responsibilities.
* Cheetahs have been isolated away from visitors.
* Attention was diverted away from his misdeeds.
* The goalie deflected the ball away from the net.
* They turned away from their heritage.
* The Indians migrated away from the coastal zones.
* She moved a short distance away from her family.
* She was terrorized at being separated away from her children.
* Don’t shift away from your responsibilities.
* The cargo was diverted away from the harbor and then shipped away to China.
* He deflected the puck away.
* The tide ebbed away.
* Picture them sequestered away from the world.

Now observe what has been redundantly perpetrated with the word “out”:

* We filter out the light and screen out the misfits.
* We map out a strategy and edit out what we don’t like before we sift out the facts.
* Her winsomeness radiates out.
* We rent out a house and transfer out from the army into civilian life.

And then we have statements such as:

* Out of 150 donors examined, 3 out of 10 had to be refused.
* Vapors precipitated out as both rain and snow.
* Chinese rescue workers encouraged many elderly to stay, even as whole towns emptied out.
* Separate out the prisoner’s intentions from his actions.

What about his being toxically obsessed with ferreting out reporters’ preferences; the Republicans contracting out their canvassing operations; or people seeking out, plotting out, and figuring out what they should do?
The notion of “time” can also announce itself with inane redundancies. Consider the following: a lengthy period of time; at some point in the future; at some future time; at any given point in time; at this moment in time; from the same time period.

Additionally we may encounter:

* Stock splits have occurred over time.
* Numerous studies extend back in time.
* It’s something we’ll be able to use in the future.
* It happened several times in the past.
* It is still observed today.
* In three to five years they’ll be in a position to do it by then.

Should I dare ask if there exists any reader who has not encountered such solecisms “in the past?” Of course not!
Finally, the word “back” is probably employed redundantly more often than any other. Can anything excuse phrases such as: His commitment stretches back to his youth; turning one’s thoughts back to earlier times; asking for nothing back in return; a tradition dating back to an early age; ceding ground back to his adversary; relaying the answers back; pointing back to yesteryear; funneling back into the trough; relating back the information; reflecting sunlight back into space; shipping treasures back across the sea; reverting back to childhood; extending back to the 1800’s; shifting the emphasis back to a time before he was born?

These redundant “backs” continue to appear perhaps far more often than you ever thought possible.

Maybe you’ve even become accustomed to such abominations as:

* The illegal immigrants were transported back to Mexico.
* He hoped to return the relationship back to trust.
* His mind drifted back to the Civil War.
* The spacecraft sent back to earth its first observations.
* They vacillated back and forth.
* General Meyers transmitted the data back.
* They arrived back home.
* He had heard back from the company.
* They thought the animal existed back in former times
* They dispersed back into the mountains.

Remember, all of the foregoing statements have appeared recently in reputable newspapers and magazines.
And what about this egregious statement? “The president was firmly convinced in his own mind that every last thing he did was right.” Six words in this abominable sentence call for deracination.
Linguistically, it’s acceptable to throw a person out of the house or down the stairs; or to have him bed down anywhere; to give him the time of day or to look back over your shoulder and away from the sun. The problem is not with the words but with their needless usage.

On a final note, be reminded that in this column we’ve been considering only unnecessary repetitions. Of course, repetition can be employed gloriously and for sundry purposes including balance, emphasis, rhyme, transition, connection, alliteration, consonance, assonance, chiming, and even contrast or comparison.

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
Thomas Jefferson

Quentin Blake
http://books.guardian.co.uk/graphic/0,,2282021,00.html
I didn’t go into the shed very often, because the whole point of it as far as Roald was concerned was that it was private, a sanctuary where he could work where no one interrupted him. The whole of the inside was organised as a place for writing: so the old wing-back chair had part of the back burrowed out to make it more comfortable; he had a sleeping bag that he put his legs in when it was cold and a footstool to rest them on; he had a very characteristic Roald arrangement for a writing table with a bar across the arms of the chair and a cardboard tube that altered the angle of the board on which he wrote. As he didn’t want to move from his chair everything was within reach. He wrote on yellow legal paper with his favourite kind of pencils; he started off with a handful of them ready sharpened. He used to smoke and there is an ashtray with cigarette butts preserved to this day.

The table near to his right hand had all kinds of strange memorabilia on it, one of which was part of his own hip bone that had been removed; another was a ball of silver paper that he’d collected from bars of chocolate since he was a young man and it had gradually increased in size. There were various other things that had been sent to him by fans or schoolchildren.

On the wall were letters from schools, and photographs of his family. The three or four strips of paper behind his head were bookmarks, which I had drawn. He kept the curtains closed so that nothing from outside came in to interfere with the story that he was imagining. He went into the shed in the morning and wrote until lunchtime. He didn’t write in the afternoon, but went back later to edit what he’d done after it had been typed out by his secretary.

He wrote in the shed as long as I knew him – we worked together for 15 years from 1975 to 1990 and I illustrated a dozen of his books. I would take my drawings down to Gipsy House for him to look at while sitting on the sofa in the dining room. I don’t think he let anybody in the shed.