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Loading... Rhodes: The Race for Africaby Antony Thomas
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.   oirm42 | May 25, 2018 |  His story is extraordinary. After suffering illness as a teenager (a literal hole in the heart), Rhodes realized he had but one short life to live and he set out to become a Great Man. He chose the Cape Colony and soon was a multimillionaire, thanks to hard work and ferocious business dealings in diamonds and gold. Rhodes tricked the Matabele into losing their land and their king, while he dreamed of a British Empire running from Capetown to Nairobi. I walked between earth and sky, and when I looked down I said, 'This earth should be English,' and when I looked up, I said, 'The English should rule the earth'. The Boer War actually comes toward the end of the book and one does not feel sorry for either side, as the Afrikaners and the British both took that which did not belong to them. I feel the book did its duty and portrayed a man in depth, but the author puts the full blame for the later system of apartheid on to Rhodes' shoulders, which is a bit of a reach. Yes, he changed from a man who felt everyone should have the same opportunity to a man focused on empire-building, but the Boers were far more obsessed with racial superiority than Rhodes seemed to be. South Africa produced Rhodes and Mandela, two incredible bookends. Smashing country. One imagines how Rhodes would have fit into the world of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, or Jeff Bezos. I think he would have been a Tech Titan with a private space fleet and a hankering for the colonization of Mars. Book Season = Spring (when the winds blow fresh across the Cape) (  ) Gold_Gato | Sep 16, 2013 | no reviews | add a review
Having been sent to southern Africa as a sickly 18-year-old in 1871, by the age of 30 Cecil Rhodes was the wealthiest man in the western world. Within a further ten years a country almost the size of Europe was named in his honour - Rhodesia. This biography presents Rhodes as a man consumed by ambition, blessed with charisma, tortured by love, and threatened at the pinnacle of his power by an influential female politician, Princess Catherine Radziwill. It is a story of diamonds and gold, of a lust for power that started wars and destroyed nations, of a priceless empire carved in the image of an extraordinary man. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)968.04092History and Geography Africa South Africa and southern AfricaLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.89)
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