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  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407072975
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352

A Walk with a White Bushman




A Walk with a White Bushman offers a tempting preamble to many longer explorations. For those who have, it offers the kind of renewed inspiration of which there can never be too much.

Explorer, novelist, writer and film-maker, Sir Laurens van der Post was one of the most influential figures of our era. Here, in conversation with Jean-Marc Pottiez, he records his ideas and insights into a wide range of issues and personalities, forged by a lifetime of vast experiences and challenges.

  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407072975
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352

About the author

Laurens Van Der Post

Laurens Van Der Post was born in South Africa in 1906, the thirteenth of fifteen children in a family of Dutch and French Hugeunot origins. Most of his adult life was spent with one foot in Africa and one in England. His professions of writer and farmer were interrupted by ten years of soldiering in the British army, serving with distinction in the Western Desert, Abyssinia, Burma and the Far East. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, he was held in captivity for three years before returning to active service as a member of Lord Mountbatten's staff in Indonesia and, later, as Military Attache to the British Minister in Java.

After 1949 he undertook several official missions exploring little-known parts of Africa, and his journey in search of the Bushmen in 1957 formed the basis of his famous documentary film and The Lost World of the Kalahari. Other television films include All Africa Within Us and The Story of Carl Gustav Jung, whom he met after the war and grew to know as a personal friend. In 1934 he wrote In a Province, the first book by a South African to expose the horrors of racism. Other books include Venture to the Interior (1952), The Heart of the Hunter (1961), and A Walk with a White Bushman (1986). The Seed and the Sower was made into a film under the title Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, and, more recently, A Story Like the Wind and A Far-Off Place were combined and made into the film A Far-Off Place.

Sir Laurens Van Der Post was awarded the CBE in 1947 and received his knighthood in 1981. He died in 1996.

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Praise for A Walk with a White Bushman

A deeply thoughtful, engrossing book about his fascinatingly varied life and unusual ideas... Refreshingly unconventional, inspiring, optimistic, wise and true

Sunday Express

Bushmen, Africa, the relation of man to animals (beautiful stories about elephants), Japan and Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, the forgiveness of enemies, June, spiritual growth, Churchill, Smuts, Mountbatten... Such a rapid catalogue must omit much of what he talks about, but may give some impression of the book's riches

The Times

I rank Laurens van der Post with the best writers of English - this book confirms my constant admiration and the nobility of his mind

Raymond Mortimer, Sunday Times

No one can write more feelingly of Africa... An experience not to be missed

Evening Standard

Overflows with ideas and insights gained during a long and eventful life

Independent