A remarkably full-bodied and frank discussion of Africa’s place in the world.
The director of the Royal African Society offers an ambitious, roundly informative and still intimate look at sub-Saharan Africa’s turbulent road in the modern era.
Though Dowden fell in love with the continent when he ventured to Uganda in the early 1970s as an idealistic young teacher, he was booted out by Idi Amin’s burgeoning regime. As a journalist covering African politics, he has seen firsthand how the so-called Big Man leaders—specifically Mobutu in Congo, Daniel arap Moi in Kenya, Sani Abacha in Nigeria and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe—have systematically destroyed many of the fledging nations by establishing a ruthless military rule, squandering rich natural resources and nationalizing industry, thereby holding the reins of wealth. The end of colonialism has given way to horrendous civil wars, genocide and the increased impoverishment of the African people, largely because the government systems left by the imperial powers were not rooted in African culture or experience but were based on Western models. Moreover, Dowden notes, many Western powers, including Britain, France and the United States, supported dictatorships that served their own strategic interests, such as the Israeli training and backing of Amin. The author methodically examines some of the toughest issues facing many African nations in their struggle for self-determination and autonomy: the 1994 genocide in Rwanda; rampant government corruption; the curse of diamonds and oil; and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. He also looks at the phenomenal success story of Asian emigrants and businesses moving to the continent; the Chinese, in particular, “go where Western workers fear to tread.” Dowden displays a deeply felt knowledge of the recent history of sub-Sahara Africa, and his suggestions for its future are well-informed and wise.
A remarkably full-bodied and frank discussion of Africa’s place in the world.Pub Date: March 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58648-753-9
Page Count: 596
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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