Some Flim-Flam with Socks
Adam Kuper: Laurens vander Post, 3 January 2002
Storyteller: The Many Lives of Laurens vander Post
by J.D.F. Jones.
Murray, 505 pp., £25, September 2001,0 7195 5580 9 Show More
by J.D.F. Jones.
Murray, 505 pp., £25, September 2001,
“... In 1972, when his reputation was close to its peak, Laurens vander Post published a novel called A Story like the Wind. Reviewing it in the TLS, I wrote that it was an old-fashioned colonial romance, but since the book carried a portentous preface in which Van derPost described himself as a great authority on Africa, I added that his statements about the Bushmen, the Zulu and other peoples were unreliable and tinged with racism, and that much of his material was drawn uncritically (without acknowledgment) from outdated sources ... ”