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Historian Bill Nasson describes Karel Schoeman’s new book, Cape Lives of the Eighteenth Century, as a rich pudding from which to pick out savoury plums. Schoeman reminds us, says Nasson, of a Cape in which branding, scourging, mutilation, amputation, empalement, roasting, drowning, strangulation, breaking on a cross and shredding with red-hot pincers were all standard fare to get people into line again.

A well-known skeptic about the SA tradition of writers warmly backslapping other writers in literary reviews recently commented that if most new works of writing were getting “carrots” instead of “sticks” in public reviews, then something was definitely amiss with the “sticks” SA critics were using. Well, Rustum Kozain offers SLiPnet readers a nuanced display of how to wield the critical stick – compassionately, without sarky one-upmanship, but robustly, in his review of Erich Rautenbach’s dagga-infused novel, The Unexploded Boer.

In yet another deft review, cultural critic Wamuwi Mbao, a Stellenbosch doctoral candidate in English, finds very little gonzo puffery to complain about in Fiona Forde’s clear-eyed biography of the Great White People’s Boogey Man, Juju.

If you’ve been too busy in the past while to read Christopher Hitchens’ madly smart essays about the Iraq War, among other topics, then you might want to have a look at Kavish Chetty’s equally smart review of the recently departed Hitchens’ final book, Arguably.

Margie Orford’s editor, Lynda Gilfillan, has finally had enough of genre snobs who look down on thrillers as if they’re some kind of sub-species of “real” writing. Gilfillan gives her view of what’s going on in Orford’s 2011 novel, Gallows Hill.

Diane Awerbuck’s review of Ivan Vladislavić’s The Loss Library is a genuine Master Class in the art of the concise review: conversational, witty, conceptually razor-sharp, and fearsomely to the point. It deserves to be made prescribed reading for students who want to become critics.