Pakenham se heldere uiteensetting van die stryd tussen Boer en Brit word hier in keurige en besonder leesbare Afrikaans aangebied. Die werk verteenwoordig een van die beste algemene bydraes in die omvangryke literatuur oor die oorlog.
-PROF A GRUNDLINGH - UNIVERSITEIT VAN SUID AFRIKA

Hierdie nuwe uitgawe van Leon Rousseau se briljante vertaling van Thomas Pakenham se boeiende verhaal van die oorlog van 1899 tot 1902, sal wyd verwelkom word.
-PROF SB SPIES – UNIVERSITEIT VAN SUID AFRIKAM

’n Sprankelende vertaling van Pakenham se klassieke werk oor die Anglo-Boereoorlog
-DR CN VAN DER MERWE – UNIVERSITEIT VAN KAAPSTAD

R215.00 • ISBN: 978-1-86842-344-6 • Feb 2009 • Paperback • 724 pages 245 x 170mm World rights • Category: History

Thomas Pakenham – no stranger to Africa with his award-winning books, The Scramble for Africa and The Boer War, nor to remarkable trees with his best-selling Meetings with Remarkable Trees and Remarkable Trees of the World – combines his two interests on safari in southern Africa in pursuit of remarkable trees. His particular quarry is the rare, the giant, the very old, the extraordinary, or the simply beautiful, or those trees imbued with significance, written about by the great explorers of the past, or associated with magic, folklore, or ritual

The result is a highly individual book, the product of a brilliant photographer and an original mind. In an opening section he describes his journey and the extraordinary moments of drama and even danger, and those moments of triumph as he stands in awe before a tree, connected by some primitive, atavistic bond. It is those moments we share in the resulting photographs. The texts that accompany each image are as individual as his photographs, a beautifully crafted blend of botany and social history.

Title: In Search of Remarkable Trees On Safari in Southern Africa
Author: Thomas Pakenham
ISBN: 978-1-86842-287-6
Format: Hardback with dust jacket
Pub Date: October
RRP: R350,00

With this astonishing collection of tree portraits, Thomas Pakenham has produced a new kind of tree book. The arrangement owes little to conventional botany. The sixty trees are grouped according to their own strong personalities: Natives, Travellers, Shrines, Fantasies and Survivors.

From the ancient native trees, many of which are huge and immeasurably old, to the exotic newcomers of Europe, the East and North America, Meetings with Remarkable Trees captures the history and beauty of these entrancing living structures.

Each tree is a living historical monument in its own right and this volume reveals a variety of sacred trees, poets’ trees and fantastical trees extraordinary in both their appearance and their history. Common to all these trees is their power to inspire awe and wonder.

Meetings with Remarkable Trees is a lovingly researched, beautifully illustrated with colour photographs, engravings and maps – a moving testimonial to Earth’s largest and oldest living structures.

Thomas Pakenham is the author of the critically acclaimed The Scramble for Africa which won the W.H. Smith Award and the Alan Paton Award. He is also the author of The Boer War and The Year of Liberty. He lives in Country Westmeath, Ireland and is chairman of the Irish Tree Society. He plants trees both for profit and for ornament.

With this astonishing collection of tree portraits, Thomas Pakenham has produced a new kind of tree book. The arrangement owes little to conventional botany. The sixty trees are grouped according to their own strong personalities: Natives, Travellers, Shrines, Fantasies and Survivors. From the ancient native trees, many of which are huge and immeasurably old, to the exotic newcomers of Europe, the East and North America, Meetings with Remarkable Trees captures the history and beauty of these entrancing living structures.

Each tree is a living historical monument in its own right and this volume reveals a variety of sacred trees, poets’ trees and fantastical trees extraordinary in both their appearance and their history.

Common to all these trees is their power to inspire awe and wonder. Meetings with Remarkable Trees is a lovingly researched, beautifully illustrated with colour photographs, engravings and maps – a moving testimonial to Earth’s largest and oldest living structures.

Thomas Pakenham is the author of the critically acclaimed The Scramble for Africa which won the W.H. Smith Award and the Alan Paton Award. He is also the author of The Boer War and The Year of Liberty. He lives in Country Westmeath, Ireland and is chairman of the Irish Tree Society. He plants trees both for profit and for ornament.

With this astonishing collection of tree portraits, Thomas Pakenham has produced a new kind of tree book. The arrangement owes little to conventional botany. The sixty trees are grouped according to their own strong personalities: Natives, Travellers, Shrines, Fantasies and Survivors. From the ancient native trees, many of which are huge and immeasurably old, to the exotic newcomers of Europe, the East and North America, Meetings with Remarkable Trees captures the history and beauty of these entrancing living structures.

The spirit of nineteenth-century explorers lives on in British historian Thomas Pakenham, who has spent the last decade investigating the lives of the world’s most dramatic trees, many of which are in danger of destruction. After the worldwide success of his previous work, Meetings with Remarkable Trees – a stunning collection of 60 individual trees (and groups of trees) in Britain and Ireland chosen for their unusually strong personalities – he decided to hunt down and photograph another 60 remarkable trees scattered throughout the globe.

Many of these trees were already famous – champions by girth, height, volume, or age – while others had never previously been caught by the camera. His five-year odyssey, sweating it out with a 30lb Linhof camera and tripod, took him to most of the temperate and many of the tropical regions of the world. Remarkable Trees of the World is a magnificent new work that celebrates Thomas Pakenham’s gifts as a writer and a photographer. It will be treasured for generations by all those who marvel at the wonders of nature.

Thomas Pakenham is the author of the critically acclaimed The Scramble for Africa which won the W.H. Smith Award and the Alan Paton Award. He is also the author of The Boer War and The Year of Liberty. He lives in Country Westmeath, Ireland and is chairman of the Irish Tree Society. He plants trees both for profit and for ornament.

The spirit of nineteenth-century explorers lives on in British historian Thomas Pakenham, who has spent the last decade investigating the lives of the world’s most dramatic trees, many of which are in danger of destruction. After the worldwide success of his previous work, Meetings with Remarkable Trees – a stunning collection of 60 individual trees (and groups of trees) in Britain and Ireland chosen for their unusually strong personalities – he decided to hunt down and photograph another 60 remarkable trees scattered throughout the globe.

Many of these trees were already famous – champions by girth, height, volume, or age – while others had never previously been caught by the camera. His five-year odyssey, sweating it out with a 30lb Linhof camera and tripod, took him to most of the temperate and many of the tropical regions of the world. Remarkable Trees of the World is a magnificent new work that celebrates Thomas Pakenham’s gifts as a writer and a photographer. It will be treasured for generations by all those who marvel at the wonders of nature.

Thomas Pakenham is the author of the critically acclaimed The Scramble for Africa which won the W.H. Smith Award and the Alan Paton Award. He is also the author of The Boer War and The Year of Liberty. He lives in Country Westmeath, Ireland and is chairman of the Irish Tree Society. He plants trees both for profit and for ornament. His first book on trees, Meetings with Remarkable Trees (1996), received international acclaim and was made into an often repeated television series of the same name.

The war declared by the Boers on 11 October 1889 gave the British, as Kipling said, ‘no end of a lesson.’ The public expected it to be over by Christmas. It proved to be the longest (two and three quarter years), the costliest (₤200 million), the bloodiest (at least 22 000 British, 25 000 Boer and 12 000 African lives) and the most humiliating war Britain fought between 1815 and 1914.

Thomas Pakenham has written the first full-scale documentary history of the war to be attempted since 1910. His narrative is based on first-hand and largely unpublished sources. He has combed the original British documents in the Public Record Office and the material in South African archives. He has traced the private papers of Sir Redvers Buller – the British Commander-in-Chief in 1899 – letters which had remained hidden under the billiard table at Buller’s house in Devon.

He has unearthed new material from Lord Roberts’ papers, discovered a massive secret journal of the war compiled by the War Office Intelligence Department. Out of this historical goldmine, Thomas Pakenham has constructed a narrative as vivid and fast-moving as a novel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas Pakenham, the eldest son of the Earl and Countess of Longford, was born in 1933 and educated at Ampleforth and Oxford. He spent eight years researching and writing The Boer War (first published in 1979), including several months of travelling in South Africa, and mastered the original sources in both Dutch and Afrikaans as well as English. He is also the author of The Year of Liberty, The Scramble for Africa, which won the W.H. Smith Award and the Alan Paton Award, and Meetings with Remarkable Trees.

The war declared by the Boers on 11 October 1889 gave the British, as Kipling said, ‘no end of a lesson.’ The public expected it to be over by Christmas. It proved to be the longest (two and three quarter years), the costliest (₤200 million), the bloodiest (at least 22 000 British, 25 000 Boer and 12 000 African lives) and the most humiliating war Britain fought between 1815 and 1914.

First published in 1979 Thomas Pakenham’s The Boer War is still considered the standard text on the subject and this sensitively abridged illustrated edition brings it to a wider public. His narrative is based on first-hand and largely unpublished sources. He has combed the original British documents in the Public Record Office and the material in South African archives. He has traced the private papers of Sir Redvers Buller – the British Commander-in-Chief in 1899 – letters which had remained hidden under the billiard table at Buller’s house in Devon. He has unearthed new material from Lord Roberts’ papers, discovered a massive secret journal of the war compiled by the War Office Intelligence Department.

Out of this historical goldmine, Thomas Pakenham has constructed a narrative as vivid and fast-moving as a novel.

Thomas Pakenham, the eldest son of the Earl and Countess of Longford, was born in 1933 and educated at Ampleforth and Oxford. He spent eight years researching and writing The Boer War (first published in 1979), including several months of travelling in South Africa, and mastered the original sources in both Dutch and Afrikaans as well as English. He is also the author of The Year of Liberty, The Scramble for Africa, which won the W.H. Smith Award and the Alan Paton Award, and Meetings with Remarkable Trees.

Baobabs were first noted by 18th-century explorers for their extraordinary size and girth and for their bizarre appearance with what appears to be a tangle of roots sprouting from a bulbous trunk.

In the countries where they are found they are associated with many myths and legends. This is the tree which many African peoples believe to be the home of their ancestral spirits. In the creation myth in which each animal receives its own tree from the Great Spirit, it was originally given to the hyena who threw the gift down in disgust. It landed the wrong way up and so it became the ‘upside down tree’ with its roots sticking up like branches.

There are seven species of baobab. Five are found only in Madagascar, one is found in both Madagascar and twenty African countries, and the last is a native of Australia. Each of these species has been justly celebrated at length in this book.

Thomas Pakenham is the author of the critically acclaimed The Scramble for Africa which won the W.H. Smith Award and the Alan Paton Award. He is also the author of The Boer War and The Year of Liberty. He lives in Country Westmeath, Ireland and is chairman of the Irish Tree Society. He plants trees both for profit and for ornament. His first book on trees, Meetings with Remarkable Trees (1996), received international

The scramble for Africa astonished everyone. In 1880 most of the continent was still ruled by Africans, and barely explored. By 1902, five European Powers (and one extraordinary individual) had grabbed almost the whole continent, giving themselves 30 new colonies and protectorates and 10 million square miles of new territory, and 110 million bewildered new subjects. In a tour de force of historical narrative, Thomas Pakenham has written the first full-scale history of this extraordinary episode. It took him 10 years and involved trips to 22 African countries including research in Britain, France, Belgium and Germany.

This is historical narrative on the grand scale, cross-cut between Europe at the height of its power and Africa in its political infancy, covering a vast terrain and including huge cast of characters, yet as vivid and fast-moving as a novel.

Thomas Pakenham, the eldest son of the Earl and Countess of Longford, was born in 1933 and educated at Ampleforth and Oxford. He spent eight years researching and writing The Boer War (first published in 1979), including several months of travelling in South Africa, and mastered the original sources in Dutch and Afrikaans as well as English. He is also the author of The Year of Liberty, The Scramble for Africa, which won the W.H. Smith Award and the Alan Paton Award, and Meetings with Remarkable Trees.