Mandela’s ear

This book should be on every college curriculum. It reads like a short, gripping novel but in fact it is a meticulously researched, educative and very personal account of the vibrancy and the horror and the hope permeating South Africa’s apartheid history. One alternately finds oneself crying with outrage or joy or laughing at an absurdity.
When apartheid ended Dr Peter Friedland was an idealistic, young, white doctor in Johannesburg, adept at fishing bullets out of people's necks. Then his reputation found him entrusted with the equally surreal task of reversing Nelson Mandela’s hearing loss. So began a curiously intimate yet formal relationship between the two men.
The book (co-written with his sister Jill Margo, an award-winning writer in her own right) recounts the enchantment of Friedland’s many encounters with the great man, never forgetting the undertow of the trauma, blood and tears of both the apartheid era and its aftermath. Friedland pushes one’s fingers into the wounds of what it means to be a doctor working in zones of violence.
Soon one realises that this page-turner is a subtle exploration of a challenge shared by the god-like statesman and the nerve-wracked healer: the question of how to tread a moral path through a wide world of over-weening violence.

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