The Boer War in Postcards

by Ian McDonald

Book by McDonald, Ian

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Ian Neil McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He used to live in a house built in the back garden of C. S. Lewis's childhood home but has since moved to central Belfast, where he now lives, exploring interests like cats, contemplative religion, bonsai, bicycles, and comic-book collecting. He debuted in 1982 with the short story "The Island of the Dead" in the short-lived British magazine Extro. His first novel, Desolation Road, was published in 1988. Other works include King of Morning, Queen of Day (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award), River of Gods, The Dervish House (both of which won British Science Fiction Association Awards), the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch, and many more. His most recent publications are Planesrunner and Be My Enemy, books one and two of the Everness series for younger readers (though older readers will find them a ball of fun, as well). Ian worked in television development for sixteen years, but is glad to be back to writing full-time.

Reviews

[Bill38silver · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is written by a self-confessed postcard collector, not a historian. Whilst it might appear to be written from a narrow or specialist perspective, it offers plenty to see and admire in what was a new and emerging mode of communication increasingly available and in use by the general public in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. What I know about postcards before reading this book could be written on a postage stamp. However, based on my wide reading of books on the Boer War, the author manages to condense interesting narrative of this fascinating conflict in a few pages starting each of the eleven chapters followed by pertinent visual representations of events and personalities of key political and military players.

Overall, this is a surprising but worthy addition to historic accounts of a largely forgotten war. My only slight negative is that the postcards, all from the author's personal collection, could have been reproduced to larger scale ( perhaps even to actual size?) so some detail is lost and there is some duplication to show a colour and black and white versions.

[Ilze · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a postcard collector, this was quite an interesting book. I've also just read the biography of Emily Hobhouse, which makes this account all the more interesting. The Boer War (now known as the South African War) can be viewed from many different perspectives - admittedly this is true for anything in history. But looking at it from the point of view of postcards, made it more personal. It also gives you an idea of how postcards came to be in the first place and what an important part postage played not only for the soldiers of this war, but also during WWI and II. What fascinated me was that this was before the radio had been invented. This means that the only way people could keep up to date was by way of newspapers or postal correspondence, read: The postcard! This nugget of history makes it a treasured book. Just a pity it has quite a few typos.

Go to https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ilze-b... to see my own postcard version of the war.