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AFRICA IS NOT A COUNTRY

NOTES ON A BRIGHT CONTINENT

A well-researched, cleareyed deconstruction of highly flawed conventional wisdom about Africa.

A trenchant study demolishes stereotypes about Africans as a product of colonial history.

Faloyin—a senior editor at VICE who was born in Chicago and raised in Lagos until age 10, when he moved to the U.K.—opens his stern and vibrant narrative with the secret 1884 “Scramble for Africa” meeting in Berlin by European powers. “In an attempt to avoid all-out war over who got to wage war on Africa,” writes the author, “the mighty colonialists decided to meet and hash it all out, to come to a communal understanding as to how they could perfectly calculate their siege.” While many nations had already embarked on expeditions into the continent to seize natural resources and quell Indigenous uprisings, by the beginning of World War I, “90 per cent of Africa would be controlled by Europe.” The establishment of arbitrary borders often divided ethnic groups, some of whom later went to war with each other. Throughout the book, Faloyin diligently chronicles the inherited tropes that many in the West harbor about African nations. “The narrative,” he writes, “suggests there is something fundamentally ungovernable about this place and its people; something extremely uncivilized about their unhealthy relationship with power.” This “silent bigotry” involves the concept of White savior syndrome—yet another form of paternalism—as evinced by the Invisible Children project in Uganda and such celebrity charity campaigns as We Are the World and Live Aid. The author examines a series of dictatorships that resulted from colonial systems of divide and rule and forcefully calls out glaring cultural stereotypes about Africans in popular culture. He also addresses the alarming fact that “90 per cent of Africa’s material cultural legacy is being kept outside of the continent.” Faloyin weaves in his personal story as a Nigerian, using the making of Jollof rice as a unifying theme, and ends the book with forward-looking ways that African countries are managing gender and sexual violence, climate change, and other pressing matters.

A well-researched, cleareyed deconstruction of highly flawed conventional wisdom about Africa.

Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-393-88153-0

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: July 8, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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