Reading Matters (week 37) September 8, 2026

Tarryn Crossman, investigative journalist, documentary maker and now author, helped a group of mothers who lost babies and gave birth to deformed ones, after giving birth at the now imprisoned midwife Yolanda Maritz-Fouchee’s private birthing home, to bring a case against her.

In Undelivered (Penguin) Tarryn interviews the victims as well as Yolande. She delves into court transcripts and revisits the features she produced for Carte Blanche that exposed the criminal midwife’s drugging of her patients and ignoring of warning signs that their babies were clearly in distress. Well written and alarming.

Who’d have thought we need to be brave to be ordinary and yet that is what Japanese philosopher Ichiro Kishimi urges us to be in, The Courage to be Ordinary (Penguin Random House).

He wants us to be free from constant competition, from chasing approval, from feeling tense. If you’re exhausted by trying to be exceptional, this is the book for you. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Boy in the Barrel (Batya Bricker) by Eric Lieberman, is the extraordinary and true story of a Jewish boy, Izzy (8), leaving Poland for Cape Town with his father in 1899, and then losing him.

He lives on the streets with other homeless boys and 11 years later comes face to face, in Johannesburg, with the family he thought he’d lost forever. Magnificently written. Heartbreaking and heartwarming.

Field Guide to Mushrooms and other Fungi of South Africa (Struik/ Penguin House) by Gary B Goldman, Marieka Gryzenhout and Liz Popich is a glossy doorstop of a guide to every mushroom you thought you knew – and didn’t know.

It covers 420 species, has 220 new entries and over one thousand new photographs. It covers distribution, habitat and warns about the poisonous ones. You won’t need another book on mushrooms for years, maybe decades.

Reading Matters with Sue Grant-Marshall