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Brought up on stories and myths of the Kalahari Bushmen, Rupert Isaacson journeys to the dry vast grassland — which stretches across South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia — to find out the truth behind these childhood stories.
Deep in the Kalahari, Isaacson meets the last groups of Bushmen still living the traditional way, caught between their ancient culture and the growing need to protect and reclaim their dwindling hunting grounds. Little by little he is drawn into the fascinating web of ritual and prophecy that make up the Bushman reality. He hears of shamans who turn into lions, sees leopards conjured from the landscape as though by magic. He attends trance-inducing dances and witnesses incredible healings. But he also sees the heart-wrenching social problems of a dispossessed people. What follows is an adventure of an intensity he could never have predicted.
The Healing Land records Isaacson's personal transformation amid these extraordinary people, and his passionate contribution to their political struggle. It captures his enchantment with the character, corruption, kindness, and confusion of a place that has wrenched itself from the Stone Age into the new millennium.
Praise for The Healing Land
“Isaacson’s sensible writing about the Bushmen’s drunken, violent life in exile from their lands is hugely enriched by his sense of what it might mean when healers talk to lions or men become leopards in a trance. The survival of the Bushmen is tangled up with the story of Isaacson’s own family’s longing for the Africa they once knew, as irrational and exasperating and sometimes as lovely as a dream.” —Michael Pye, The New York Times Book Review
“Isaacson provides a welcome update to the old nobel-savages sterotypse with his unflinching portrait of a people riven by government relocation, alcoholism, and domestic violence.” —Outside Magazine
“Alternately distressing, uplifting and tragic”. The Healing Land is both a love song and a long, mournful cry for remembrance” Isaacson recounts the plight of the Bushmen of the Kalahari and their vanishing culture without rancor, yet his plea splinters the heart.” —Retha Oliver, San Antonio Express-News
“A moving account of a remarkable personal journey through the Kalahari desert. Part travel writing, part history of the Bushmen, part personal quest, [The Healing Land] records what author Rupert Isaacson finds in the silent, empty desert spaces.” —The Portland Skanner
“[Isaacson] delivers a worthwhile account of the few remaining nomadic Bushmen in southern Africa. . . . [The Healing Land] is more than just a travel memoir; it’s a powerful sociopolitical study and a tribute to the marginalized indigenous peoples of the Kalahari Desert.” —Katie Millbauer, Seattle Weekly
“Readers come away with respect for the struggles of all indigenous people, coupled with an awareness that they may not live particularly pretty lives themselves.” —Publishers Weekly
“Isaacson writes simply and well. . . . His images are sometimes as exotic as those conjured by his relatives, but his story is warmer and more empathetic. Though history, adventure, and social commentary intermingle with the mysticism of legendary healers and trance dances, the book remains a journalistic report on a clash of civilizations and a microcosmic portrayal of a continent’s evolution.” —Edward K. Owusu-Ansah, Library Journal
“This heart-wrenching story has connections worldwide with Indigenous peoples’ struggle for survival and identity. Isaacson’s personal journey with the Bushmen of southern Africa brings you up close to the urgency of their present displacement, even as he connects it with their long heritage of ‘death, disaster, and despair.’” —Hazel Rochman, Booklist
“[This] story... has never been told... by a narrator so openhearted, optimistic, and vulnerable to enchantment... Full of mystery, magic and strange coincidence. Highly recommended.” —Rian Malan
“The Kalahari is a place, says the dynamic young author of this book, where the skin between this world and the other–the world of power–is exceedingly thin. The multiple crossings of this membrane . . . structure a page-turning non-fiction account, one which many readers have found unable to put down.” —Dr. Megan Biesele, Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas
“A more clear-sighted view [of the Bushmen] is long overdue–which makes Rupert Isaacson’s book most welcome.” —The Economist
“A beautifully written account that simultaneously intrigues, educates, and fascinates.” —Marie Claire
“This is a traveller’s book as well as a memoir, with a skein of mysticism running through it. It is well written, engaging, and enlightening. Isaacson lets the people he meets speak for themselves . . . and through his work, in quite a strange way, the Kalahari too. All the reader needs to do is hear it.” —Johannesburg Citizen
“A dark delight of a Kalahari feast.” —Cape Argus
Rupert Isaacson has written guidebooks to various African countries and writes for Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, and many other magazines.