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This just in: Adam Habib (pictured below), a top researcher at South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), was denied entry into the United States last week after arriving in New York as part of an official delegation. According to reports, upon disembarking from his airplane he was questioned by customs officials - then deported under armed escort.

Adam Habib at the 2006 Cape Town Book Fair

• Follow the story: Sunday Times | Mining Weekly | Staten Island Live

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by Bill Buford

reviewed by Ben Oswest

This review appeared in edited form in the 8 Oct 06 Sunday Independent. Here’s the link (subscribers only):

• Heat reviewed by Ben Oswest

And here’s the full review:

Of the many accusations that it’s possible to level against The New Yorker magazine, where Bill Buford was the fiction editor until quite recently – that it is nakedly snobbish; that it keeps a bloodshot, rather cynical weather eye on the Arab world in its Middle East reporting; or that it smugly publishes, with maddening regularity, some of the best English writing on the planet – a denunciation that it’s “machoâ€�? isn’t one of them. The New Yorker is for nakedly snobbish cynics who enjoy the best English writing on the planet. Macho it’s not. And that, it seems, turned out to be a problem for Bill Buford.

• Purchase a copy of Heat.

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by Imraan Coovadia
Umuzi, 2006

reviewed by Ben Oswest

Coovadia’s latest novel is the “book of the week” in today’s Sunday Times; I wrote the review, which the paper published in slightly-edited form.

• Green-Eyed Thieves reviewed by Ben Oswest (Sunday Times 6 Aug 06).
• Purchase a copy of Green-Eyed Thieves.

Here’s the review in full:

Of the many astute observations tossed out with offhand dexterity in Imraan Coovadia’s Green-Eyed Thieves, one of the most telling is the remark from the novel’s main character – the aptly-named Firoze Peer – that “It’s a defining trait of great villains… to flourish in death.” The “great villain” Peer refers to is none other than Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on September 11, 2001, and, posthumously, a personality flourishing in the imaginations of dozens of writers, including John Updike and Martin Amis.

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