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  • Published: 30 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448191499
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 229

The Voice of the Thunder



An urgent manifestop for renewal in the human spirit, a clarion call for recognition of life's great imperatives, and a stirring vision of hope for our discordant time.

From the beginning, Lauren Van Der Post has been aware of a dimension in life far longer and more significant than the outer eventfulness of everyday living. His perception of life's mysterious power began with the Bushman, the first people of his native Africa, and grew in the universal imagery of dreams, the fertile legends and stories of ancient civilization, the intuitive teaching of prophets, poets and other pioneers of human awareness. In this book he has brought together two of his most deeply felt and far reaching essays, and has extended their message with great imaginative insight, exploring the potential in all men and women to acquire self-knowledge and to live life according to its fundamental precepts.

  • Published: 30 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448191499
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 229

About the author

Laurens Van Der Post

Laurens Van Der Post was born in South Africa in 1906, the thirteenth of fifteen children in a family of Dutch and French Hugeunot origins. Most of his adult life was spent with one foot in Africa and one in England. His professions of writer and farmer were interrupted by ten years of soldiering in the British army, serving with distinction in the Western Desert, Abyssinia, Burma and the Far East. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, he was held in captivity for three years before returning to active service as a member of Lord Mountbatten's staff in Indonesia and, later, as Military Attache to the British Minister in Java.

After 1949 he undertook several official missions exploring little-known parts of Africa, and his journey in search of the Bushmen in 1957 formed the basis of his famous documentary film and The Lost World of the Kalahari. Other television films include All Africa Within Us and The Story of Carl Gustav Jung, whom he met after the war and grew to know as a personal friend. In 1934 he wrote In a Province, the first book by a South African to expose the horrors of racism. Other books include Venture to the Interior (1952), The Heart of the Hunter (1961), and A Walk with a White Bushman (1986). The Seed and the Sower was made into a film under the title Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, and, more recently, A Story Like the Wind and A Far-Off Place were combined and made into the film A Far-Off Place.

Sir Laurens Van Der Post was awarded the CBE in 1947 and received his knighthood in 1981. He died in 1996.

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