This marvellous book has achieved what few can but many aim for: to draw us into the lives of working people. And in the case of South Africa we not only suffer their pain but also rejoice in their conquests. - M.C. Steele in * HISTORY *
One of the many achievements of this brilliant biography is to provide a key to understanding not only of what has torn South Africans apart, but also of what has bound them together. -- Brian Willan * THE SPECTATOR *
Some 15 years in the making, based on interviews, archives, conversations with members of the Maine family, but aided most of all by the prodigious memory of Kas Maine himself, this life of an illiterate sharecropper takes on an unexpected clarity. Like good crystal, touch it anywhere and it rings true. Van Onselen has done South Africans a favour by addressing the essential question: how did we get to be like this? -- Christopher Hope * THE NEW STATESMAN *
... a magnificent celebration of the art of the oral historian ... This is a remarkable, possibly unique historical record focusing so intensely upon one family ... Along the way, van Onselen crams nearly a century of a nation's history into the life of one man. -- David Anderson * THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *
