Views From the Southern Cross

Adventures and misadventures make for great stories. Drawing on over seven decades of life experience spanning three continents, Views from the Southern Cross chronicles Bruce Finnemore's life growing up in the farming community of Theunissen in the Free State where long drops were blown up, bread was baked in anthills and budgies were captured by convicts, to wreaking havoc on a ship bound for the United Kingdom in the 1950s, to the hilarities of medical school where he trained to become a dentist in the 1970s, to journeying halfway across the world to trace his family tree back hundreds of years in an effort that gained him international recognition. Borne from a love of history, guns and the South African bushveld, and interspersed with wickedly funny pranks that began during Bruce's childhood and extended—often backfiring—throughout his adult life, this book, painted with the vibrant hues of a true South African adventurer, storyteller and family man, will have you chuckling and shaking your head in disbelief while being propelled along dusty roads and through towering grass, into sangoma's caves and out into the cool shade of the thorn trees and Lala palms, where horned beasts rest as they attempt to escape the shimmering heat of the South African savannah, lazily flicking flies away with their tails, snorting at intruders, and looking down their noses at you as if you owed them money.