From the beginniong Fine Lines from the Box traces a journey of the mind and an ongoing exercise of reading and writing by one of South Africas most incisive commentators. Taken with Njabulo Ndebeles earlier Rediscovery of the Ordinary, this collection challenges, entreats, cajoles and prods one into understanding a range of issues – the loss of innocence in achieving a new South Africa, the President and the AIDS question, higher education and the liberal tradition, the place of English in modern South Africa, that African icon Brenda Fassie, the vagaries of journalism, and the time in the life of a country when the oppressed must free the oppressor. Covering a span of eighteen years from 1987 to 2006 these pieces cut to the nations quick. They provide a sane view of our recent past and explain much about what often seems to a baffling present.