The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey

History lies heavily on South Africa, and in an original literary form—half-history, half-reportage—Adam Hochschild brings to bear a life-time’s familiarity with the country. He looks at the tensions of modern-day South Africa through a dramatic prism: the pivotal nineteenth-century Battle of Blood River—which determined whether the Boers or the Zulus would control that part of the world—and its contentious commemoration by rival groups one hundred fifty years later. This incisive book is an unusual window onto a society that still today remains divided.