Reading any book by Bessie Head is always a pleasure, though this talented South African writer's newest work, Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind,… falls in a special category. What Head has so effectively done is to take all her gifts as a novelist and use these talents in shaping a quasi-sociological account of the village in Botswana where she has lived for most of the past ten years. Part history, part anthropology and folklore, Serowe conjured up for me memories of Studs Terkel's Hard Times. As the author states in her introduction, "Serowe is an historic village but not spectacularly so, its history is precariously oral." Thus Head has interviewed dozens of people who live in Serowe today and has orchestrated their stories into the wider perspective of village life. The results are often astonishingly beautiful. What this book so strongly demonstrates is the possibility for harmony...