I'm not one for sad or painful books. I'll happily go to a movie that I know will pull the emotional heart-strings, but I'm definitely not one for investing time and effort in traversing through hundreds of pages of something that will induce sensations of pain, guilt, remorse or some of those other wonderfully melancholic emotions.

Thanks to some fairly unrelated events I have found myself remembering one such book that I read a few years back. I seem to have relegated it to the deepest, darkest parts of my memory reserves in trying to forget that I ever read it. The aforementioned culprit is Antjie Krog's acclaimed work, Country of My Skull. The book is an in-depth, personal narrative "with the goal of capturing the overwhelming moral, emotional, and historical complexity of the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa."

I almost didn't have a choice in reading the book ...  read more »