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Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation | |||||||
 
| 100% Recommended by our customers. Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The Catalog: Book Release date: 2008-08-14 Media: Hardcover Number of pages: 288 Ean: 9781594201745 Book Isbn: 1594201749  Tip: compare prices with similar booksAuthor:
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A thrilling, inspiring account of one of the greatest charm offensives in history—Nelson Mandela’s decade-long campaign to unite his country, beginning in his jail cell and ending with a rugby tournament In 1985, Nelson Mandela, then in prison for twenty-three years, set about winning over the fiercest proponents of apartheid, from his jailers to the head of South Africa’s military. First he earned his freedom and then he won the presidency in the nation’s first free election in 1994. But he knew that South Africa was still dangerously divided by almost fifty years of apartheid. If he couldn’t unite his country in a visceral, emotional way—and fast—it would collapse into chaos. He would need all the charisma and strategic acumen he had honed during half a century of activism, and he’d need a cause all South Africans could share. Mandela picked one of the more farfetched causes imaginable—the national rugby team, the Springboks, who would host the sport’s World Cup in 1995. Against the giants of the sport, the Springboks’ chances of victory were remote. But their chances of capturing the hearts of most South Africans seemed remoter still, as they had long been the embodiment of white supremacist rule. During apartheid, the all-white Springboks and their fans had belted out racist fight songs, and blacks would come to Springbok matches to cheer for whatever team was playing against them. Yet Mandela believed that the Springboks could embody—and engage—the new South Africa. And the Springboks themselves embraced the scheme. Soon South African TV would carry images of the team singing “Nkosi Sikelele Afrika,” the longtime anthem of black resistance to apartheid. As their surprising string of victories lengthened, their home-field advantage grew exponentially. South Africans of every color and political stripe found themselves falling for the team. When the Springboks took to the field for the championship match against New Zealand’s heavily favored squad, Mandela sat in his presidential box wearing a Springbok jersey while sixty-two-thousand fans, mostly white, chanted “Nelson! Nelson!” Millions more gathered around their TV sets, whether in dusty black townships or leafy white suburbs, to urge their team toward victory. The Springboks won a nail-biter that day, defying the oddsmakers and capping Mandela’s miraculous ten-year-long effort to bring forty-three million South Africans together in an enduring bond. John Carlin, a former South Africa bureau chief for the London Independent, offers a singular portrait of the greatest statesman of our time in action, blending the volatile cocktail of race, sport, and politics to intoxicating effect. He draws on extensive interviews with Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and dozens of other South Africans caught up in Mandela’s momentous campaign, and the Springboks’ unlikely triumph. As he makes stirringly clear, their championship transcended the mere thrill of victory to erase ancient hatreds and make a nation whole. |
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Written on September 29, 2008 Summary: Forging a National Consciousness through Mutual Respect Playing the Enemy is a very timely book. In these days when nations are often more divided than before, Nelson Mandela's instinct to show respect, friendliness, and common purpose with those who saw him as an enemy is a beacon that lights up the potential for all people to come together to accomplish more. John Carlin has used the Rugby World Cup imaginatively to illustrate the essence of President Mandela's approach. Mr. Carlin is a wonderful story teller, and you'll feel chills as you read the many great moments he brilliantly captures in Playing the Enemy. Leaders have always used foreign enemies to bring their purpose together. Who realized that this could be done at the level of sport rather than through war as a way to unify a country where people were deeply suspicious (even paranoid) about one another? I was glad to see that Mr. Carlin provided lots of background about how someone imprisoned for decades became the leader of a reconstituted nation in South Africa and went on to accomplish things that not even the most optimistic would have expected. President Mandela's story is one for the ages, and this way of telling the story makes it easier to understand for those who never saw South Africa during the Apartheid regime. Although I had long studied and worked to help change the government in South Africa from the inside and outside, the political impact of the international boycott of the South African rugby team had been lost to me. I hope those who would like to encourage governments to behave more appropriately towards their people will remember this example. Bravo, Mr. Carlin! Written on September 28, 2008 Summary: A masterpiece This book is an absolute masterpiece of writing, a true gem and one that will certainly melt the hearts of many. On the surface it is about a rugby match between South Africa's Springboks and New Zealand in 1995. But it is representative of much more because, as the author shows, this match helped bring together South Africa after the fall of Apartheid, healing, at least in a small way, the anger of the blacks and the fear of the whites that the new nation would reject them. This was clear when Mandela came to support the rugby team, which had been seen as a symbol of Afrikaner nationalism, wholeheartedly. The book is more than the game, it covers many important characters and their reactions on the day of the match. The author is certainly an expert on South Africa, having lived there as a journalist, and he understands the soul of many of the people of the country. He understands also the history of the Afrikaners, the tradition of the 'Bitter enders' who had fought the british to 'bitter end' in the Boer War. This is a very nice book, an important story and one that will surely inspire. Unfortunatly the story paints a perfect utopian pciture of South Africa, one that has not stood the test of time. With the murder rate the highest in the world, AIDs running wild, farm invasions and the prospect of a new president whose motto used to be 'bring me my machine gun', South Africa's 1995 rugby match may well have just been a moment of reconciliation that could not last. Seth J. Frantzman Written on September 21, 2008 Summary: Engaging lens on Nelson Mandela's brilliant leadership This is a book about sports and politics, and how the two can be brilliantly combined in the service of peace. Not just a picture into the workings of transition from apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa, Playing with the Enemy describes the deepest understanding of man's universal need to belong to a winning "team". Nelson Mandela understood that need, transcended his own opportunity for vengeance, and led his country into the political miracle of modern times. Engagingly written; a very special book. Written on September 21, 2008 Summary: Deeply touching and informative Though I was quite engaged in the anti-Apartheidt movment, I discovered how little I knew about Mandela's savvy and often ironic approach to his and his country's struggle. He didn't hate his captors, and it is hard to understand until you read the intimate and complex way he set about winning them over. it was almost shocking to see how charm and warmth were employed in this endeavor; sucessfully! Written on September 3, 2008 Summary: A book about rugby? Don't be fooled. This is so much more... If you read nothing else this year, get your hands on "Playing the Enemy" and read pages 201 to 253. It won't take long. By the time Nelson Mandela walks into that stadium, your heart will be pounding. By the time he walks into the Springboks locker, you'll be in tears. And you'll cry pretty much straight through to the end. All because, on June 24, 1995, the South African Rugby team beat New Zealand to win the Rugby World Cup. If you're like most Americans, you know that Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison --- 18 of them in a tiny cell on Robben Island --- and emerged without hatred to spearhead a peaceful transfer of power in South Africa. But you probably know nothing about the 1995 Rugby World Cup match. John Carlin's brilliant book corrects that, and, along the way, presents a concise biography of a remarkable man. In these pages, Nelson Mandela is a brilliant politician with a genius for disarming his enemies. To Mandela, everyone is human, everyone can be reached. The only question is how. In prison, he would introduce his lawyer to his "guard of honor" --- and his jailers would find themselves shaking hands with an attorney they loathed. And he used his dead time in prison to teach himself Afrikaans, read the Afrikaans newspapers and familiarize himself with Afrikaner history. Rugby is the favorite sport of Afrikaners, the dominant white tribe in South Africa --- "apartheid's master race." All but one of the 15 players on the Springbok team were white. In a stadium that held 62,000, 95% of the crowd would be white. No wonder that blacks saw the Boks as a symbol of oppression. "Don't address their brains," Mandela believed. "Address their hearts." One direct way to do that was through sports. People love their teams; the connection is purely emotional. If the Springboks could come to engage both blacks and whites, that might end the sense among blacks that sports in South Africa was "apartheid in tracksuits" --- and might make whites more accepting of blacks as equals. Mandela did not just lay out a goal. He met and charmed the white lords of rugby, then lobbied for the World Cup to be played in South Africa. He invited François Pienaar, the Springboks captain, to visit him and encouraged him to see his sport as "nation building". Soon the team was learning how to sing "Nkosi Sikele", the black national anthem. And, because a storybook fantasy was becoming reality, the Springboks advanced steadily to the World Cup finals. The pages that are your homework begin on the morning of the championship game. One of Mandela's bodyguards got an idea: Mandela should enter the stadium wearing a green-and-gold Springbok jersey. Mandela improved on the idea --- his jersey, he said, should have Pienaar's number on it. Across town, the players had been staying at a hotel. To calm their nerves, they went out for an early morning jog. As they left, Pienaar recalled, "Four little black kids selling newspapers recognized us and chased after us and started calling out our names --- they knew almost everyone on that team --- and the hairs on my neck stood on end... It was the moment when I saw, more clearly than ever before, that this was far bigger than anything we could ever have imagined." Five minutes before kickoff, Nelson Mandela walked onto the field to greet the players. To the Springbok jersey, he had added a Springbok hat. "When they caught sight of him," Carlin writes, "the crowd seemed to go dead still." And then the chant --- from the almost all-white crowd --- began: "Nel-son! Nel-son! Nel-son!" I'm going to leave it there, so as not to spoil the magic of the next pages for you. Just know that what happened in that stadium that afternoon was a crazy quilt of glory: atonement, forgiveness, liberation and celebration. It's the kind of event that happens when people who have known only hatred and fear drop the burden of history and move past their differences. Winning a game? That day South Africa climbed a mountain. It is a measure of the quality of this story that Morgan Freeman is producing a film based on the book --- and playing Nelson Mandela. Matt Damon will be Pienaar, the South African rugby captain. And Clint Eastwood is slated to direct. I guarantee you: Audiences will cheer. And weep. And these will be tears of joy, because --- for once --- a national leader had perfect pitch, and all of his countrymen knew it, and they all got it right. In other countries, even in our own, skeptics doubt that this kind of brotherhood can be engineered. It can be. It was. |
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| Catalog | Book | Book | Book | Book | Book | Book |
| Release date | 2008-08-14 | 2008-09-08 | 2008-09-29 | 2008-09-19 | 2008-07-29 | 2008-05-05 |
| Media | Hardcover | Hardcover | Hardcover | Hardcover | Hardcover | Hardcover |
| Format | - | - | Roughcut | - | - | - |
| Number of pages | 288 | 448 | 976 | 576 | 288 | 288 |
| Ean | 9781594201745 | 9780374166854 | 9780553805093 | 9780061768064 | 9780385340991 | 9780393062359 |
| Book Isbn | 1594201749 | 0374166854 | 0553805096 | 0061768065 | 0385340990 | 039306235X |
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