Edith Mildred Mayne (Mim Egan), born in 1914 in Oatley, Sydney NSW, lived through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Spanish 'flu and Covid 19 and in 2021 is still alive at 106. Started as a collection of a short stories of memories of her life, Mim Egan's story is the story of many born in that era. She witnessed the arrival of aeroplanes and cars. She lived before electricity, before telephones in homes and before the radio. There was no running water - only tanks - from which water had to be bucketed. If you needed hot water it had to be heated up in the copper or on the wood stove - and first the fire had to be lit and the water bucketed from the tanks. Mim at aged 4, remembers the soldiers arriving home from WW1 - at the local railway station to meet the soldiers- flags waving; a lot of cheering; A Band playing. When the Spanish flu hit in 1919 - her mother, Edie, acted as a visiting local nurse.

This record of reminiscences which Convocation of the University of Natal so generously invited the author to write is not strictly an autobiography but a series of rather random sketches of events and people. They deal more with the kind of happenings one like to recall something when chatting in a light-hearted way with a group of friends around the fireside. Though they have on the whole been treated in a light vein, some of the events were momentous and even tragic, as for example, wars. They affected the whole country and most of the world. The author has not indulged in a contemplative analysis of thoughts and emotions that were associated with the stories. Other events were more or less trivial and confined to the author's immediate family and friends with whom the author grew up, played and worked. It is the very heterogeneity of the author's experiences that made life interesting for the author. Those who may be interested in the author's serious activities and writings are referred to the Appendices.

Teachers are really performers, classrooms are stages, and students the captivated audience. In beautiful prose, Felman invites us to watch her one woman show on the art of performance in today's classrooms. These essays take on the greatest hits of the academy: identity politics, sexual harrassment, academic censorship, and radical pedagogy. Felman's book is a performance not to be missed.