Wide Boy: The True-ish Story of a Jo'burg Spiv - Montague Bentley

On the streets of Bez Valley Tony grew up hard and he grew up fast. In the cosmopolitan working-class suburbs of Johannesburg, he mixed with, and mixed it with, Jews, Greeks, Italians, Lebanese, blacks, Afrikaners and occasionally Anglo-Saxons. His first rite of passage is to subdue the ruthless Agnee gang, a bunch of Afrikaans school bullies. Learning tactics from his Uncle Mick, a professional wrestler who wears a large Star of David on his back to incite the anti-Jewish crowds of the East Rand, Tony starts on his life-journey of opportunism, petty crime, street-fighting and questionable business practices, driven always by his never-ending quest 'to make money ... lots of it.' Subtle, brutal, poignant, outrageous, hilarious ... Wide Boy will take the reader directly into the balmy streets of a summer day in 1946 Bez Valley; to the street-brawls of the 1950s' Hillbrow and Yeoville; to the post-war euphoric boom days of Southern Rhodesia, the ensuing bush war, sanctions-busting and, finally, to return full-circle to the sometimes murky otherworld of 'big business' in Johannesburg.

ISBN: 9780958489072

Pages: 200

Paperback                                                                                                                   

30 Degrees South, 2005

Good condition; pages tanned; old spill damage to bottom of last few pages but readability not affected

B146