Content area
Full text
The Boer War 1899-1902
David Smurthwaite
Hamlyn, 202 pp. L20. ISBN 0 600 596524
The National Army Museum Book
of The Boer War
Lord Carver
Sidgwick & Jackson, 263pp. L25. ISBN 0 283 063335
The Boer War
Tabitha Jackson
Channel 4 Books (Macmillan), 188pp. L16.99. ISBN 0 7522 1702 X
The South African War 1899-1902
Bill Nasson
Arnold 289pp ISBN 0 340 741546 (hb). L45.
ISBN 0 340 614277 (pb). L16.99.
Life on Commando during the
Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902
Fransjohan Pretorius
Human & Rousseau. 344 pp. L12. ISBN 0 7981 38084
DURING THE CENTURY SINCE IT TOOK PLACE, the South African War of 1899-1902 has never ceased to attract interest from the general public and debate amongst historians. Controversy over its origins, already underway when JA. Hobson and L.S. Amery published their opposing interpretations in 1900, has continued ever since. Participants on both sides in the war found a ready market for their published accounts even before it was over, although some of the best were only published much later.
Amongst the many books written about this war by both amateur and professional historians, the best known is Thomas Pakenham's The Boer War, which has been a bestseller ever since it first appeared in 1979. Wellresearched and engagingly written, Pakenham's account has deserved its success, despite sniffy reviews from some academic historians. The wealth of visual evidence available about this war already indicated in the illustrated edition of his book which Pakenham published in 1993 - is well represented in some of the books under review, where many photographs are reproduced for the first time.
Tabitha Jackson's smoothly-written book will not satisfy professional historians, and is too neglectful of key aspects of the war to become the introductory text they will recommend to their students, but it draws substantially on the magnificent archive of visual material and oral testimony assembled by the Twenty Twenty Television team during the making of the four-part documentary film about this war to be screened on Channel 4 in the early autumn. Future historians of this war will have every reason to be grateful for the wide range of fresh material assembled over the past year in the course of this production. Meanwhile, as the book of the television series,...