AFRICA -- ANGRY YOUNG GIANT

This book has been written to arouse the interest of the intelligent laymen in the problems of the African states and to give them a working knowledge of the great forces which have been unleashed, in the emergent nations south of the Sahara and north of the an expensive area consisting of 26 countries. The book's value lies not in the author's analysis, but in his detailed and accurate account of the geographical and cultural background of these countries, of their political and economic programs, and of the different patterns and groupings of these new regimes. The author not only has traveled thirty months in Africa, but has obviously rend widely in the specialist literature. He quite wisely devotes less space to further discussion of Ghana and Guinea, and rather gives greater attention to Nigeria the emerging powerful and constructive influence in Africa. The conclusion sets out briefly the philosophy and politics of Pan-Africanism. The book is enormously detailed and endlessly absorbing, though at times somewhat trivial and at other times needlessly concerned over the absence of theoretical democratic forms of government. Nevertheless, the famine of good studies of either French Equatorial Africa or the Union of marks this work for all collections.