'Look up Claim Hill and feel, in your groin, the thrill of Estoril and Exclusives, of the Skyline and Gotham City; none of that is there any more, but something else is, some other kid is finding his way, her feet, his city, her path, his future, her umtshotsho.'Review to follow.

Mark Gevisser's Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred is easily the best serious book written about modern South Africa. This is a very different book, a personal, intimate account of growing up in Johannesburg and a meditation on what it means to live in a city with a history of division and separation. What it shares with the Mbeki book is a command of language, a writer's mind that ceaselessly opens new doors and asks new questions and an anchor sunk deep into the muddy substrata of a nation that i...

a personal reminiscence of growing up in apartheid with the very interesting angle of using city maps to study his and his city's/country's biography. black parts of city did not exist, on paper. gevisser writes and this book is very like sebald's memory books Austerlitz

A stunning and heartbreaking book. The story of a young white, Jewish, man growing up in Johannesburg, trying as a child who loved maps to understand the borders beyond which the maps stopped, and the black townships began. It is also a story of being gay, and the surprising changes that occurred there in its acceptability, protections written into the constitution at a time when other nations were not yet there. But it is also a brutally honest story of a vicious crime, and the intense struggle...

The most intimate, detailed and heartfelt ode to Johannesburg one is ever likely to read. I feel privileged to have been let inside. Trying to understand the city that used to be gold? Read Mark Gevisser's book.

I enjoyed the second half of this book which dealt with the mine dumps in Johannesburg, but the chapter devoted to The Wilds resonated with me as we have just returned from Durban where the author could just as easily have been describing the condition of the Durban botanic gardens where we once used to proudly take all our overseas visitors. Same problems with the cycads and the similar amazing dedicated workers such as Enos Mhlanga the chief horticulturalist. The follow up to the attack descri...

There are a lot of unspoken things that contribute to the “voice” of this book, and, since it is a memoir, the voice of its author by extension. Unspoken privilege. Unspoken resentment. Unspoken condescension. The author does try to address issues of his privilege, but this often happens in a “woe is me for being so rich” kind of way: lamenting trips to London after the Soweto uprising, being angry at his parents for “forcing” him to study at Yale. These are not the “relatable” experiences the a...

Interesting, heartfelt, touching, this is partly an exploration of place, Johannesburg, of self and identity, of recent history, and of how all these and more become intertwined. Bookending all of this is the frightening and yet horribly prosaic home invasion suffered by Gevisser and two companions one night, in a flat near The Wilds, which I myself roamed happily and safely many years ago. Maybe what the book is not quite honest enough about, perhaps for artistic or perhaps for political reason...

I received this book as a first read. It's an interesting memoir. It has some issues with jumping around and lacking continuity. But it's a neat look at how society can divide itself both in life and in death. I enjoyed the discussion of various maps and how they tied into history. I also really enjoyed the discussions about cemeteries. It was interesting to see how similar South Africa is to the United States in segregation and discrimination and families broken apart by "passing". There were a...

Maps are an interesting entry point into the system of Apartheid, what the maps showed and did not show. What was hidden and what was exposed. Mark Gevisser is an engaging writer, he has researched his subject matter very well. As a Joburg native, he opened my eyes to the city in a new way. His own personal struggles within the South African framework of Apartheid resonated with me at times, but his agonising over what he could have, should have noticed or done or stood up for or against became

i read this book in 2 days,i bought it from bangkok this year,i read it in 2 days and liked it.it is about a young boy growing up in south africa .in johannesburg .he draws maps and the novelist nadine gordimer has been mentioned in it. it is based in south africa and the country is decribed.he is gay and gets married to a man and then he is victim of an attack.

The breadth and depth of this book is a gift to me. I am so glad that a fellow white South African man has written so sensitively about growing up under apartheid, both aware and unaware of his privileges, both insider and outsider at the same time. And that he writes so lovingly about Johannesburg whether he is exposing its divisions and depravity or its transformative power and possibility. I feel as though his experience and honesty somehow validates my own.Gevisser is able to situate a very

‘Dispatcher’ by Mark Gevisser is an important book, not only for South African readers but for the world. To review such a book is beyond my power so this is, in a sense, a simple appreciation. Every now and then the world’s seemingly unfathomable places throws up a writer who can think and feel a path through its complexity to a kind of truth that others can understand. Mark Gevisser is such a writer and ‘Dispatcher’ is such a book. Johannesburg, South Africa is his place and he suffers its cr...

I feel like I know Johannesburg and all its depth, secrets, and value. I guess I need to visit it now...Gevisser is a well-known, critically acclaimed writer here in South Africa, yet I struggled with his memoir. Most parts I had to force myself through, while a small portion were enjoyable and informative. I feel that me being an American with all my ignorance, I couldn't quite appreciate its mastery as much as a South African could. My favorite part was most definitely the recall of the armed

Meh - It was a good idea in theory to write a book and using maps to "guide" the story. However, it became somewhat repetitive while at the same time not fluid enough (there was a lot of skipping around) and I decided to not finish this and went to the end to find out about the attack, as that was the only remotely interesting detail. The story of the attack was too detailed and, though my curiosity was piqued and then satisfied, frankly, it was boring to me and I ended up skimming that part as

I wanted to like this more than I did, because it was so comprehensive and well-researched, and because I learnt so much about the city of my birth, but the placing of the story of the attack near the end of the book spoilt the whole thing for me. It was as if Gevisser was saying, all this social and political history, this rich detail and extensive research is only a device to lead the reader to the most important part of the book: the trauma of the attack.

There may have been too much history to allow Gevisser free rein to share his story, because this memoir often drifted far from the personal. I also found the cartophilic moments somewhat distracting, but I think it was a necessary abstraction that allowed Gevisser the emotional distance to share as much of his city as he did. Interesting and poignant, yet not great.

A very intimate book with details of this man’s life, past and present, which was at times moving to read but unfortunately did not add up to much for me. It was great to learn about Johannesburg, especially from the view of a white, middle-class, gay Jew growing up in the time of Apartheid. It was interesting to read about him growing up and learning about racism and how it shaped the world around him, discovering his sexuality and the world available to him at that time, and traveling away to

This is a book hard to review and hard to rate. It's by an apparently well-known white, gay, Jewish South African journalist about growing up and living in Johannesburg and the racial issues in that country. That's clearly many things I'm not (besides white). In some books and in this book for stretches, that's fascinating to look at someone and somewhere so different. However, this book wanders and assumes a level of knowledge of places and locations in Joburg that I don't have and I suspect mo...

A delightful memoir of growing up in Johannesburg. It took me back to my own childhood and brought back many fond memories. Gevisser has a deep knowledge of Johannesburg's history and his writing is informed and enriched by it. I also thoroughly enjoyed how he interweaved the strands of the past and the present (2012) into one coherent thread, and in so doing, illuminated those parts of the city that were only glimpsed at by most white residents during the Apartheid era