Word: boer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...loyal servants hovering, a lady who is a whore and a whore who becomes a lady, and the whole rich gumbo stirred up by The War that sets brother against brother, section against section The Civil War? Well, no; for Author Stuart Cloete (rhymes with booty), it is the Boer War, but otherwise the formula is unmistakable...
Shrapnel & Atrocities. Perhaps most remarkable about the Boer War was its length: for nearly three years the might of the British Empire was fought off by a sprinkling of fiercely independent Dutch settlers in the interior of South Africa. The conflict saw history's last cavalry charge with lance and saber, and the first wide-scale use of shrapnel, barbed wire, trenches, machine guns. Resembling the American Civil War in fact as well as in fiction-formula, the Boer War found the most daring soldiers and the most skillful generals on the losing side, while the victors...
Himself of part-Boer, part-British ancestry, Cloete has set up his characters on both sides of the war, with care for minor historical detail, and with absolute fidelity to the sentimental tradition. His chief English hero, rich and handsome Captain Turnbull, observes the battles as a headquarters officer while musing on women and love, is posted back to his cavalry regiment in disgrace when he dares protest the scorched-earth policy. Turnbull's London mistress, a tart-of-gold he had rescued from white slavery, follows him to Africa by volunteering to nurse the wounded...
Almost a Man. The main Boer hero, poor and handsome Boete van der Berg, fights alongside each great chieftain in turn, at the end surrenders with Jan Christiaan Smuts. His girl ferrets out military secrets by flirting with British officers. After the war they start life anew, with 500 gold sovereigns saved from the looters by an aged Kaffir retainer. And so it goes in plummy neo-Hemingway prose, with three dozen major characters, 189 speaking parts, thousands of extras, and big-name guest stars playing themselves-War Correspondent Winston Churchill, Army Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle, Stretcher-Bearer Mohandas Gandhi...
...almost a man." At this level of pure romanticism, the book offers certain delights, not all of them perhaps intended by the author. As a serious attempt to understand South Africa, the book offers only pretensions. Old Africa Hand Stuart Cloete knows perfectly well that the Boer War, like the Civil War, was rooted in the problem of race, was the reaction of a primarily agrarian people to a threat to that "way of life" where the white man rules unquestioned. But this basic fact-in a novel about the conflict that cast in concrete the mentality of the Afrikaner...