‘If you made me angry, to me, for that anger to go away, I have to get hold of you … I have to do something to you.’
‘I didn’t feel myself. I felt numb, like a zombie, like a switch had been flicked and a light had gone off.’
These are the words of some of South Africa’s most terrifying serial killers, who spoke to psychologist Brin Hodgskiss in the bowels of the country’s most secure prisons.
Hodgskiss interviewed several of the most notorious serial killers and his recordings sat gathering dust until recently, when top true-crime podcaster Nicole Engelbrecht found his research online. The two connected and now they bring their love of storytelling to this highly readable book.
In Killer Stories, Hodgskiss combines his interviews with the tenets of narrative psychology to take the reader into the minds of the killers and shares with us the ways in which his own journey as a psychologist and human being contributed to his deeper understanding of them. The book intertwines the killers’ versions of the truth and the true-crime stories behind them, re-telling their killing sprees in gripping detail.
Journey with the authors as they lay out how the stories these men told themselves about their lives contributed to where they ended up – and how those stories aren’t that different from those we all tell ourselves.
Crash and Burn is an insider’s tale of the South African airline industry over the past thirty years and the dramatic collapse of Comair in 2022, as told by Glenn Orsmond, twice CEO of Comair and the founder CEO of 1time. Orsmond takes the reader on a wild ride through the ultra-competitive sector of low-cost airlines that boomed after South African Airways’ stranglehold on the skies was loosened in the 1990s. Comair – which operated both Kulula and British Airways – and 1time were at the forefront of this new wave of airlines that saw domestic flying and tourism take off.
But after some incredible highs and lows, Comair crashed under Orsmond’s watch despite the company’s 75-year unblemished profit history. The pandemic’s impact, the grounding of aeroplanes after a questionable regulator investigation and poor management decisions all contributed to its downfall.
Expect tales of industry legends and innovation, but also of competitors trying to gut each other, battles between pilots and accountants, unions and bosses at loggerheads, and warfare between shareholders and directors in boardrooms. You’ll never think of flying in South Africa in the same way again.
The first Italian POWs arrived in the Union of South Africa in early 1941, most of them being held in Zonderwater Camp outside Cullinan or in work camps across the country. The government of Jan Smuts saw them as a source of cheap labour that would contribute to harvesting schemes, road-building projects such as the old Du Toit’s Kloof Pass between Paarl and Worcester and even to prickly-pear eradication schemes.
Prisoners of Jan Smu
