"I view this book (alongside ‘Country of my Skull�) as essential reading for any South African who wants to fully understand our country’s past, and how it continues to shape our future. Drawing on never before-seen transcriptions of Nelson’s conversations in prison, Steinberg masterfully uncovers the masks both Winnie and Nelson so carefully cultivated.

I value being able to see these two much-mythologised figures in a more honest light, even though it shatters the image I’ve had of Nelson since childhood: he was an actor, playing a part to safeguard our transition to democracy, but underneath so much of that is raw pain and anger, in a way which is far more understandable than the heroic icon we came to know.

Winnie has always been a more complicated figure. As her legacy continues to be re-written, this book helps us to place her actions in their full context - she suffered an indescribable amount under the apartheid regime. But ultimately, she channelled this pain into inciting and perpetrating more violence, at odds with everything her husband stood for in later life. However, it is her revolutionary mindset that has captured the hearts of many young South Africans who have become disenchanted with the ‘Rainbow nation�.

As the new generation grapples with their legacies, and how to move forward from our violent past, this book should undoubtedly be the first port of call."

"Chances are, if Jonny Steinberg hadn’t been the author, I probably wouldn’t have read this book. I thought, incorrectly, that I already knew enough about Winnie and Nelson. I was very wrong.
Jonny Steinberg does not need to prove that he is a master in his field � I knew that the first time I picked up one of his books quite a few years ago. His attention to detail and rooting out facts and anecdotes that add much to the comprehension of a difficult and complicated subject is quite simply amazing.
Winnie has always been a disturbing individual in my eyes. She remains so, but with greater layers of understanding as to what made her the person she became. Nelson will probably become more controversial with time, and Steinberg’s book opens the door to a more profound round of the questioning of his legacy.
Perhaps on a wider scale, this book exposes the rot, deceit corruption and violence in politics, even when there’s a good story to tell. There’s no doubt that South Africa created Winnie and Nelson. In Winnie’s case, the violence of the apartheid government would forever colour her vision as would prison for her husband.
Winnie and Nelson were also humans � with desires and concerns like billions of others inhabiting this planet. Emotions would influence decisions, anger could get in the way of logic, as could love.
I don’t think that South Africa has moved very far beyond the concerns this country faced during the lives of the Mandelas and the Madikizelas. History is being painted with a very brush containing few strands. Steinberg’s book is an antidote to so many missing links.
I cannot end this gushing review without paying tribute to Eusebius McKaiser. I was at Love Books in Melville on May 24, 2023, to listen to Eusebius interview Jonny about this book. Eusebius was absolutely the right person to conduct the review � he had read the book, he understood it, he knew the context and the background intimately. The bookshop was packed. There were few in attendance, if any, who did not want to read the book after listening to the exchange between these two masters. RIP Eusebius, and Jonny, if you write a book about the mating habits of the common moth, I’ll buy it.
"

"This book is hot garbage. It’s one of the worst and most pointless books I’ve ever read.

Tsing, an anthropologist, has attempted to write about some ill-defined phase of post-capitalism while apparently knowing next to nothing about capitalism. “Salvage capitalism,� as she tries to use that term, turns out to be just . . . capitalism.

Again and again, Tsing writes tautologically about the most basic and banal capitalist subjects as if she is Captain Cook discovering Hawaii.

This book seems to be the result of someone functionally illiterate in economics who lives on a tenured state salary and has her assistants handle messy details like, say, buying tickets to Japan and China on Kayak. Tsing is blown away by the most basic market activities, like, for example, a market between pickers of mushrooms and mushroom buyers. These very basic forms of markets seem new and amazing to Tsing, who appears to have never participated in any kind of market. Want to blow Tsing’s mind? take her to the Chicago Commodities Exchange for fifteen minutes. Prices change quickly! People reach agreement on prices, for things, which are commodities!

After some desultory and fruitless attempts to explain what is meant by “salvage capitalism,� the book simply wanders off, into irrelevant and pointless digressions about trees, about Finnish forest management, about fungal DNA, about soil, and all sorts of other topics outside the realm of Tsing’s training or expertise, but about which she feels perfectly comfortable boring us, assuming we’ll find her random Wikipedia- and random lunch-meeting-powered musings delightful and charming. They’re not. They’re deadly boring and dispiriting as the reader becomes more and more despondent, hoping against hope that at some point Tsing will cut the muddle-headed bullshit and try to explain what her point is. (Spoiler: she doesn’t.)

And what is her point? Something about matsutake mushrooms, which are a popular luxury item in Japan and Korea, and which cannot be farm grown, but are picked in the wild in different places, usually in forests that have, at some point, been “disturbed� by human intervention. Something about “slowing down,� and “using our senses.� (Perhaps some Zen-manual writer had a service mark on “Mindfulness.�) Something about “precarity� now that “progress is over�; something about “assemblages,� which is apparently everything and nothing. Everything connects, guys!

The entire project is misbegotten. How is examining the picking economy for luxury mushrooms at all helpful in understanding “the possibility of life in capitalist ruins�? (Spoiler: it’s not.) If we’re going to discuss “salvage capitalism,� wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on, say, child laborers trying to extract metals and minerals from discarded cell phones and laptops?

The project seems to be about the promise of interdisciplinarity, but ends up being a great exhibit for the case that people should stay in their lanes. People with no training in and little understanding of economics should probably not presume to write a meandering, digressive, and self-indulgent mess that purports to describe a fundamental paradigm shift in an economic model. It doesn’t work. This book doesn’t work. The fact that it’s received so many accolades and glowing reviews is good evidence that there’s a lot of shoddy work being done in the social sciences and humanities, especially where work is not peer reviewed or held to any standards or real criticism, as appears to have been the case here."

"Too much jargon, too little insight.

While there is a lot that's undeniably stylish here and the opening and closing chapters are emotionally vivid, the text as whole gets bogged down in analysis that now seems hopelessly dated and was even a bit passé at the time of writing. Preciado tries to jazz it up with lots of sex, drugs (even a bit of rock and roll) and name-dropping aplenty but it's still dull as dishwater and the prose is just about as murky. I did like the clear timelines and history of contraception and hormonal treatment, and wish the rest of the book retained some of that clarity. I'm not sorry to have read this but doubt I'll read anything else by Preciado again. "