Elephants, their majesty and their power in The Elephant Whisperer

From The Week of March 3, 2014

The world is a playground for humanity. This is the inevitable conclusion drawn by a species that, for thousands of years, has flourished as Earth's apex predator. No other creature can match our intelligence, our self-awareness, our emotional depth. No other species has produced poets and playwrights, gods and scientists. These findings, these thought experiments, distinguish us from the great dumb herd that comprises the world we are free to exploit.

But naturally, this is nonsense, the destructive conclusion of biased thinking. For humans typically only respect as intelligent things they understand. Present to us music and math problems, politics and prose, that we, on some level, comprehend and we are more than willing to acknowledge your personhood, your worthiness. But communicate to us in a language we're not geared to understand -- the skitterings of the monkey, the song of the whale, the bone-deep vibrations of the elephant -- and you are a beast of burden, a thing whose power is to be harnessed and used to our benefit. This inexcusable intellectual arrogance has not only allowed us to ravage our planet, it has permitted us to do it guilt free. The costs are immeasurable, a truth vividly illustrated in Mr. Anthony's touching life story.

Compared to much of the rest of the world, Africa is a wonderland of biodiversity. Swamps and forests, deserts and jungles together contain a breathtaking spectrum of life, from tiny spiders to gigantic elephants, from venomous snakes to harmless dogs, a balance ecosystem in which the ruthless, millennia-long dance of nature and evolution has unfolded. But now, after countless centuries of natural ebb and flow, this treasure trove of life is under threat, not only from encroaching humans but their externalities as well. Urbanization, climate change and trophy hunting have reduced this once vibrant place to a shadow of what it was. Every year, the deserts grow at the expanse of the forests and once populous creatures are hunted for their meat and their horns, as the glories of evolution are reduced to cliched mementos of man's undeserved prowess.

Recently, however, movements have ignited to push back against this butchery of the wild. Conservationists have succeeded in having huge swaths of African territory designated as nature preserves where the ecosystem is allowed to flourish unmolested by all but a handful of poachers who are dealt with violently and mercilessly. Staffed by naturalists whose life's work is the understanding of and treatment of animals, and funded both by governments and tourism, these reserves hold a mirror up to the world, of how it once was and how it will someday never be, the essence of natural, if cruel, harmony.

The story of Lawrence Anthony, the head of the Thula Thula Game Reserve, The Elephant Whisperer is a charming adventure through the life of a world-class conservationist. Organized around Anthony's reception of a herd of elephants abused and hunted by man and the means by which he restores their health and their trust, the work expands to include lush descriptions of the Reserve: its incredible wildlife, its caring staff, its venomous dangers and its thorny politics which are uneasy at the best of times. Throughout, we are afforded glimpses of lives lived with purpose, not to gain advantage, not to hoard wealth, not even to accrue power; simply to hold on to the glories of what came before, beauty we are all-too-eager to bulldoze in favor of another town, another residential complex, another hotel and casino. In this, it is hard not to think of Anthony and those like him as the guardians of nature, as stewards of life the rest of us dismiss as unworthy.

There can be no doubt that Mr. Anthony's charm and passion rides high throughout The Elephant Whisperer, but it is to the credit of Anthony and his biographer that the elephant herd is the work's beating heart. Over and over, the authors demonstrate the grace and intelligence of these majestic creatures who appear as emotionally connected to their allies and their environment as they are willing to fiercely protect it. Described in vivid detail, their five-ton bodies seem as massive as their awareness of the external world is keen, communicating complex notions of friendship and suspicion with devastatingly simple gestures that leave the reader yearning to witness even one of these life-altering moments of cross-species connection. For they leave no doubt that we are not alone on this world we've claimed, that we share it with others who too-often go unheard in the congress of Earth's affairs.

There are flaws here. For a conservationist, Mr. Anthony is a little too fond of recounting his own successes. The Elephant Whisperer's first half is almost entirely about the compassion that Anthony and his friends have for the animals they steward. One cannot help but imagine an alternate text in which the animals feature more prominently than the humans. However, beginning in the work's second half, a series of devastating failures on Anthony's part allows the reader to forge an emotional connection with him and his cause. We are made to understand just how much this means to him and how much of a difference it makes to the creatures in the reserve. This sweeps aside concerns of egotism, leaving in its wake a heart warmed by the world he is fortunate enough to know so well.

A read with the power to re-shape the way one thinks about both Earth and our role in its concrete future... (4/5 Stars)

A phenomenal look at a forgotten massacre in King Leopold's Ghost

From The Week of August 26th, 2013

Of colonialism's many sins, the degree to which it encourages humans to separate the strong from the weak, the momentarily superior from the disadvantaged inferior, must be its most grievous. After all, by dint of being both the planet's apex predator and foremost intelligent species, humanity is already predisposed to a self-centered view of the world, skewed to favor the viewer at the expense of all else. To then exacerbate this existing trait with all of colonialism's criminal enticements is akin to pouring gasoline upon a fire, an inferno of injustice, exploitation and degradation from which few ever recover.

Worse yet, though, is what this mental sense of otherness does to the victims who, starved, beaten and destroyed, having no culture or resource left to fall back upon, cultivate the victimizer's toxic tactics in hopes of lifting themselves out of the mire into which their fellows have been plunged. Abused becoming abuser creates the most pernicious vicious cycle imaginable, one in which peace and justice are made foreign concepts to entire generations. This Adam Hochschild exquisitely and passionately captures in his valuable investigative work.

Positioned in the heart of Africa, the war-torn and resource-rich country we know today as The Democratic Republic of the Congo has had a long and tragic history. Though claimed by the Portuguese in the 15th century, it was virtually inaccessible to European imperialism until the nineteenth, when Henry Morgan Stanley successfully traversed its dangerous terrain in hopes of locating Dr. David Livingstone, the missionary doctor and explorer who had famously vanished into this strange and foreign place. Until this time, and despite the Portuguese's unenforced claim, the Congo was an organized, self-sufficient kingdom ruled from present-day Kinshasa by a lord known as the Manikongo. But once Stanley's expedition proved that Westerners could withstand the dangers of the Congo, albeit with an excess of luck and endeavor, this kingdom would fall to the voracious hunger of Western appetites.

By the late nineteenth century, most of the world had been claimed in one way or another by the major western European powers of France, Germany and england. When Stanley's expedition proved that the Congo could be a prize to be won, tiny Belgium, lead by the ambition and hunger of its king, Leopold II, leaped at the opportunity to conquer it and, in a stroke, vastly expand its power and prosperity. Though this conquest would take many years to complete and be recognized by the international community, King Leopold II, with a combination of guile and relentlessness, would eventually prove victorious, creating the Congo Free State which began to export large amounts of priceless ivory and rubber to Belgium in exchange for relatively worthless items like glass and beads. But however horrendous this economic exploitation, the human cost was far worse. For in order to create this trade, Leopold's men instituted one of the most ruthless and degrading administrations in history, one in which women and children were systematically starved, beaten and murdered to encourage Congolese men to labor for Belgian gain.

The tale of these abominable crimes and how they came to light, King Leopold's Ghost is a mesmerizing and moving work of non-fiction. Mr. Hochschild, a first-rate historian who rarely disappoints, has set his nimble pen and sharp mind to detailing an all-but-forgotten chapter of western imperialism, one made all the more shocking for its darkness. For make no mistake. The crimes of King Leopold II and his men are at least as grave and despicable as those of the holocaust. The only difference here lies in Leopold's motives which were not forged by ethnic hatred but by greed, made no less potent by its simplicity. Step by cautious step, Leopold convinced the western powers that his intentions with the Congo were humanitarian, even pious, all while implementing, throughout this conquered land, a rule so foul, so cruel, that it inspired the writing of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a work which was, in no way, forced to exaggerate for effect.

Of King Leopold's Ghost's many virtues, the most memorable is the way in which it it reveals the role bias plays in the lives of man. Belgian crimes in the Congo were brought to light by a series of brave men, white and black, European and American, who, thanks to first-hand experience with the systematized beatings, shootings and rapes of the Congolese people, saw through leopold's lies and began declaring them to the public. However, these individuals were only few in number, a tiny fraction of the thousands of Europeans who had been to the Congo under Leopold's reign and watched the hands of the disobedient chopped off, looked on while entire villages were wiped out and the survivors forced into chaingangs, and observed the punishments with the vicious chicotte which often left its victims mortally wounded. This vast majority were silent. They were content to steal from an oppressed and brutalized people. They were content to earn and look the other way.

Even more troubling, though, are the biases amongst the social crusaders, all of whom believed in the rightness of British imperialism. The queen's justice was righteous and true, a light that should be shone upon the whole of the savage world. But Belgian imperialism was another story, the sins of which had to be exposed. This narrowness of thinking, this inability to recognize the universal despotism and criminality that arises out of colonialism, is utterly arresting, but no moreso than the will of the Belgian people to deny that their little country was complicit in the deaths of nearly ten-million people. Not until the 1980s were the records of this time revealed. And even then, no one was encouraged to read them. This is a crime against humanity they would just as soon bury.

But while there are in this tale no clean skins, there is this. When others forget, we can remember. We can read great books and remind ourselves that all crimes have been executed before, in one form or another. And in this way, when they are tried again,we can recognize them. We can be there to say "stop," "no," "this will not be allowed to pass."

A work as riveting as it is valuable... (5/5 Stars)

Scams, corruption and the new Africa in Ferguson's 419

From The Week of April 8, 2013

What do we owe one another? More than seven billion people inhabit our planet, seven billion souls who dream as we do, work as we do, fail as we do. They possess different personalities, different goals, different cultural ethics, but they are fundamentally beings built from the same blueprint, individuals who descend from a common place and a common time. And yet, with this being true, we still fight one another, steal from one another, denigrate one another, all in the hopes of reserving for ourselves the largest portion of available resources and privileges possible. Some might argue this is right and proper. After all, of those seven billion, we will only ever meet a vanishingly small fraction. And we don't owe anything to people we'll never meet. Or do we? What are the costs of acting against those we'll never know? Will Ferguson ruminates in his intriguing novel of modern reality.

Known colloquially as a 419 scheme, drawing its name from the section of the Nigerian criminal code that prohibits it, this infamous practice attempts to defraud an individual of their savings by making the victim an offer temptation won't allow them to refuse. Having risen to prominence with the popularization of email, the Nigerian Scam is the most famous strain of this disease. Though it has various derivations, the scam generally offers the victim a lucrative payout if they will wire the scammer a substantial sum of money, ostensibly used by the scammer to unlock an even greater sum of money such as an inheritance. In reality, however, the scammer has no intention of paying back the victim. For the entire enterprise is a fiction used merely to capture the victim's initial investment. Though the odds of success are low for the scammer, the rewards are high enough for them to persist until they find someone credulous enough to fall for their lies.

Laura Curtis, a copy-editor living in Canada, is made painfully aware of the price of this scam when, after her father's death in a car accident, his bank accounts and email history reveal a devastating truth, that he is only of 419's victims. Preying on his chivalry, the scammer has defrauded the elder Curtis out of not only his savings but the money from a loan Curtis took out to aid a fictional girl. Though Laura's brother is enraged, haplessly threatening to sue everyone involved, Laura is the only one determined to act. Driven by grief, she attempts to track down the specific scammer, traveling to Nigeria where she is immersed in a world utterly foreign to her, a world of vicious criminal gangs, ruthless government troops, cold-hearted oil companies and beleaguered natives of the Nigeria delta trying to survive in a hellish, ever-changing environment.

A slow and steady build towards a darkly moving crescendo, 419 is at times laborious and mesmerizing. Mr. Ferguson deploys three primary protagonists, a Nigerian scammer, a native of the Nigerian delta and a beleaguered, pregnant girl from inner Africa, to draw the reader into a noisy world as utterly foreign to the West as it is harsh on its inhabitants. As the narrative switches between Lagos, the delta and the dubious roads and polluting oil derricks that connect them, we can feel modern Africa in all of its post-colonial splendor and corruption. Through the eyes of these partially empowered actors, we come to understand not only the heavy burden of colonialism's legacy left on the souls and the societies of this continent, but the razor-sharp keenness of the Resource Curse that afflicts Nigeria, miring it in so much corruption that it's nearly impossible for the country to lift itself out of economic chaos.

For all of the emotive power of 419's African characters, Laura Curtis is the novel's driving force. Sharing with the reader both culture and ethics, Curtis channels the reader's empathy and outrage which she shapes into a cold sword of justice. She is a bright spot of familiarity and vengeance amidst a sea of foreign ways and means. And yet, for all that she is the reader's port in the storm, she is also the novel's downfall. For Mr. Ferguson is never able to bring Laura to life in the same way he does the Nigerian cast. He tries to inject her with grief and rage, but these powerful emotions seem to slide off of her impenetrable exterior, leaving behind an austere shell. We sympathize with her plight and cheer on her desire for action, but this never coalesces into anything like a human being we'd recognize.

With an engaging cast of characters, cinematic prose and an expanse of quality research into both Nigeria and 419, Mr. Ferguson has produced an interesting read that pays off those who persist with it. However, periods of inactivity and the occasional slide into spiritualism prevent it from truly standing out. (3/5 Stars

Behind The Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

From The Week of March 05, 2012

As much as we endeavor to remind ourselves that we are lucky and that not everyone is blessed to live as we do, these are but empty admonishments, whispers on the wind of ignorance. For unless we actually experience true poverty, we cannot understand it: how it shapes our every action, how it limits our every dream, and how it empowers the cruel while crushing the hopeful. This isn't to say that we should not debate the best ways to solve poverty, nor is it to say that the rhetoric from all along the political spectrum is without merit, but it is to say that all the theories and the bluster mean very little when they are confronted by true poverty. Ms. Boo has published a nearly perfect work of journalism, full of revelations and tragedies, but it is perhaps the extent to which it cuts through all our nonsense with the white merciless light of unyielding truth that makes it an enduring work.

In the developing world, few countries are being as swiftly transformed as India. Memorably demonstrated in both its fiction and its skylines, this vast country of 1.2 billion souls is hurtling into the future at such velocity that no time, much less concern, is being given to the extent to which millions of its citizens are being left behind, abandoned at the roadside while the privileged race along the highway to prosperity. The speed of India's development has left no time for its institutions to grow with it, opening up gaping holes in the social fabric through which exploiters of political, cultural and economic forces can dive through, laying their greedy paws upon what they have not earned. This corruption only encourages others to do the same, leaving only fools to play by the rules.

So what of those who are left behind? What are their lives like? What are their prospects? Do they have opportunities to advance themselves , to elevate their families out of poverty? Or are they locked into lives of perpetual toil, Sisyphian souls who, every time they manage to climb out of the neglected underworld, are shoved right back down into that darkness by the moneyed classes who are ashamed to acknowledge their existence? To find out, Ms. Boo, an American journalist who has written extensively on poverty in the west, has trained her sights upon the underclasses of Mumbai, India's largest city. Over several years, through the compilation of thousands of interviews and hours of videotape, she has assembled a portrait of a shantytown that squats on soon-to-be developed land around Mumbai's international airport. Here, in the shadows of civilization's powerful floodlights, a society ekes out a daily existence on less than a few US dollars a day. Some beg, some steal, some work odd jobs in and around the airport, and others sort and sell trash, all in the hope that somehow, someday, they will encounter a moment of good fortune, an opportunity that, when seized, will deliver them and their families from a world smeared by jealousy, envy, hatred and rivalry.

Behind The Beautiful Forevers is investigative journalism at its finest. Though it stops short of the gonzo journalism practiced to such potent effect by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bowden, it does so barely. For, here, Ms. Boo has boldly chosen to tell her story through the eyes of her subjects, the impoverished with whom she has spent such time. It's difficult to imagine that anyone could do this without taking artistic license, or without abandoning objectivity altogether. And yet Ms. Boo's characterizations, of the hopeful and the vengeful, the aspiring and the despairing, are utterly convincing. Remarkably, the impact of these sweat-soaked portraits is bested by to the extent to which she captures the social hierarchies that exist within the slums. From the boss down to the one-legged prostitute, we watch Ms. Boo unpack our neat and tidy expectations of poverty, forcing us to regard, instead, a world that possesses its own rules, its own customs and its own rhythms.

Ms. Boo has done a masterful thing. For while she has pulled back the curtain on a colorful and tragic world, she has done so without proselytizing or hand-wringing. Instead, by eliminating herself as much as possible from the tale, in plugging us directly into the minds and the emotions of the forgotten, the abandoned, she has stripped away all the political biases and cultural barriers that stand between this book's readers and its subjects, allowing us to see them as they are, people like us, who want what we want, who yearn as we yearn, who dream as we dream. She does not call us to action, or submerge us in guilt. One merely gets the impression that Ms. Boo wants us to remember the downbelow people the next time we look away from them on the street, the next time we hide ourselves from them behind tinted glass.

Exquisite work... (5/5 Stars)

The Great Fire of Rome by Stephen Dando-Collins

From The Week of March 05, 2012

What are legends? Are they apocrypha? Compelling stories that survive to the present day by dint of their entertainment value. Or are they allegories? Embellished, yes, but tales that nonetheless reflect the accepted truths of the times that birthed them. Perhaps legends are both. After all, with so much of history's facts lost to the rigors of time, we have no way of knowing if they were sparked by haters, self-aggrandizers, or even by those seeking to speak truths about the discredited, the wronged. As we lack a time machine with which to seek out the evidence that could convert legend into truth, they will remain just that, legends, funny stories that enliven our culture. That is, for most of us. Not so for Mr. Dando-Collins who, here, takes up the task of getting to the bottom of one of history's most memorable scandals. His detective work does not fail to entertain.

During its 2,000 years of cultural and political prominence, the city of Rome has suffered many disasters and indignities. It has had its treasures looted, its women raped, its buildings flattened and its streets rubbled. Some of these tragedies have even befallen it numerous times across the countless generations. As such, the great fire that all-but-consumed it in the year 64 AD might well have lapsed into history, indistinguishable from any other episode of destructive misfortune, were it not for the enduring image that has come down to us of emperor Nero fiddling while the capital of the world, his capital, burned. But such is the power of this symbol of authoritarian indifference that this legend has survived nearly two millennia, coloring both our impressions of the man and his empire. After all, it seems a fitting metaphor for the enduring political chaos that would follow in the wake of his death.

But did Nero actually fiddle while Rome burned? Mr. Dando-Collins, historian and commenter on all things ancient Rome, says no. For not only was the fiddle not introduced to Rome until decades after the great fire, the first account that makes reference to this unforgivable transgression was written more than a century after Nero's death; plenty of time for a cruel story to become accepted truth. So why the legend? What forces caused Nero's reputation to be so low that people would imagine he could be so cruel? Mr. Dando-Collins reveals that Nero did not know how to sell himself to his warlike people. For not only was it common knowledge that Nero had his domineering mother slain, he did little to hide his self-identity as a bisexual artist who knew nothing of the ways of war. More over, he may have only been tolerated by the Roman people because he kept grain prices low and because he was the last descendant of Julius Caesar. Without these virtues propping up his reign, Nero, that creature so unlike them, might well have fallen long before his city was destroyed by an epic week-long inferno that ruined a capital and brought low the most powerful man in the world.

Writing with his characteristic brashness, The Great Fire of Rome is Mr. Dando-Collins at his sardonic best. An avid chronicler of Roman history, he is able to summon the best virtues of narrative and academic history, applying both to his work. As a result, they are invariably fast-paced, compelling and informative investigations of the key moments in the chronology of ancient Rome. Here, he rescues Nero from the flames his critics have sought to consign him to, contending that there is plenty of evidence to indicate that Nero was a decent man who was poorly prepared for a challenging time. His good intentions, as evidenced by his numerous efforts at public works, were clear. And yet his artist's spirit was a poor match for the pains and pleasures of ruling a martial people. This awkward marriage eventually lead to attempts on Nero's life which radicalized him into a tyrant.

In virtually every respect, The Great Fire of Rome is a success. It leaves us with a vivid portrait of Nero, an extensive description of the fire that overtook his city, and the blaze's politically thorny aftermath which eventually lead to the emperor's downfall. However, Mr. Dando-Collins is unconvincing in his attempt to argue that the fire of Rome was a huge turning point in Roman history. His case, that Nero's rule would have turned out differently without it appears to ignore the longterm trend towards nihilism gripping the empire, even at this time. The general discontent and the lust for power would have been there with or without the fire. The inferno was merely an accelerant for an already healthy burn.

Regardless, this is narrative history at its most entertaining. (4/5 Stars)

Dancing In The Glory Of Monsters by Jason K. Stearns

From The Week of November 28, 2011

While we can all agree that war is a hellish and barbaric business that has few peers as measured by sheer destructive power, there is, at least, an opportunity for some good to come of it. The conclusion of World War II begot the Martial Plan which quite literally paved the roads for a united Europe. Stretching farther back into history, the colonial Americans earning their independence from the British in their revolutionary war laid the philosophical and political foundation for a nation that would become the most dominant force here-to-for witnessed by human civilization. However, as often as these bloody and costly conflicts might lead to a brighter tomorrow, they can just as easily leave behind festering wounds in the bodies and the minds of the belligerents who prosecute them, wounds that must be answered and then answered in turn in what swiftly becomes a loop of mutual annihilation. Though it is perhaps too early to decide which camp the Great War of Africa belongs to, the early returns, based on the observations of Mr. Stearns, favor the devastation of the latter over the hope of the former.

For the 30 years following the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected president of an independent Congo, this enormous and geographically diverse country in Africa was ruled by Mobutu Sese Seko, a murderous and self-indulgent tyrant who systematically plundered his nations resources, oversaw the decay of the national infrastructure, violently suppressed any form of opposition by dividing and conquering his enemies, and sold out what was left to foreign interests that looked the other way while he languished at the head of his own private fiefdom. It will come as no surprise then to learn that when the Mobutu government did nothing to prevent his country from sheltering the instigators and the implementors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, his house of cards finally collapsed when the vengeful Rwandans poured into his country and backed his enemy, Laurent Kabila, all the way to Kinshasa, the Congolese capital, where he seized power in the name of a new Congo.

Any hope, however, that the Kabila government might open the doors to the cleansing winds of democracy for the Congo was short-lived. Having been profoundly and irreversibly shaped by his decades in exile, Kabila demonstrated a shocking inability to govern and an unwillingness to allow anyone else to do it for him. This destructive combination crippled the new Congo and, in 2001, Kabila was assassinated, to be replaced by his only marginally more successful son. Ultimately, the crisis which grew out of the attempt to transform the Congo into a democratic state drew in eight African nations and authored countless rebel groups which ground out a five-year conflict from 1998 to 2003 that claimed the lives of upwards of seven million souls, many of whom were extinguished by disease and starvation, the handmaidens of war. This is one reporter's reconstruction of those terrifying years and the uneasy peace which has followed them to the present day.

Mr. Stearns, a Yale-educated writer and reporter, has, here, chillingly captured the costliest conflict since World War II. Marked by the chaos of shifting alliances and complicated rivalries, the author condenses a war that almost defies narrative into a dense but coherent series of events so tragic that they cause Mr. Stearns himself to wonder if the Congo is simply cursed, a country blessed with natural resources that must, nonetheless endure the corrosive caress of greed and rapaciousness. Yes, the work, at times, requires one to pause and consult Wikipedia as a means of digesting so many bloody events, but the portrait the author paints, of numerous, barely democratic governments clashing over both spilled blood and the riches of the Congo, is exquisite. He has clearly depicted the multitude of selfish ends that drove the instigators of this conflict and their failings which prevent it from being brought to anything like a fair and democratic conclusion.

Rarely has the Paradox of Plenty been more devastatingly exemplified. At times overwhelming, but otherwise a powerful reconstruction of what must surely be one of the most chaotic and despotic wars of recent memory. (4/5 Stars)

The Crisis Caravan by Linda Polman

From The Week of October 17, 2011

When we look into the world's most troubled corners, only the most callous of us cannot but feel empathy for our fellow humans who must live, every day, with chaos and despair. Families forced from their homes, famines ravaging communities, genocides playing out over regions... These ought to be crimes with penalties so severe that no savage dare indulge in them. And yet they unfold, seemingly on a yearly basis, devouring the lives of those who deserve so much more.

Should not those of us with the power to mitigate such atrocities do so, if only to spare the innocents from fates they did not invite? The answer must be a resounding yes. Not so fast, argues Ms. Polman, who points out, here, that humanitarian aid is so fraught with squandered funds and unfocused efforts that it can barely be called aid at all. In this, there could not be a larger gap between the goodness that imbues the desire to help and the dismaying corruption that results from its pure intention.

The Crisis Caravan devotes its 200-some pages to a scathing expose of the corrupted culture of humanitarian aid. Ms. Polman, a freelance journalist, reconstructs her experiences covering African conflicts, from the Rwandan Genocide to the conflict in Sierra Leone, to demonstrate that, though aid organizations (NGOs) are launched with the best of intentions, they swiftly devolve into professional fundraisers. Because NGOs do not generate their own products, because they have no internal economies to sustain them, they live and die on external funding that flows from the United Nations, the aid budgets of wealthy nations, and the pockets of generous individuals. With their very survival riding on the acquisition of contracts to lend aid to the war-torn, the NGOs quickly succumb to what the author calls Contract Fever, a particularly repugnant form of exploitation in which NGOs learn of a crisis somewhere in the world, race there to claim it as their cause, and then send up flares to the developed world for funding to give aid to the troubled. Ms. Polman argues that this aid, when it comes, is almost never vetted. Only a handful of crusading journalists ever investigate to find out if roads are paved, bridges built, water distributed, food programs established. Even scarcer are those individuals tasked with measuring the effectiveness of the aid which may well go to services considered essential by the NGOs but secondary to the people they are trying to help.

Around her own experiences watching NGOs in action and investigating their programs, Ms. Polman lays down the 150-year history of humanitarian aid, how it was spawned by the abominable conditions of the Crimean War and then rapidly expanded during the two world wars of the 20th century which devoured so many civilian lives. In this, the author not only takes the reader into war-ravaged Africa, but she beckons him into a philosophy class in which she poses the questions all-too-rarely asked of humanitarian aid. Does it prolong conflicts? The evidence suggests it might. Is it moral to give succor to the perpetrator as well as to the victim in an effort to treat all the afflicted equally as human beings? Though the ICRC may wish it otherwise, perhaps not.

The Crisis Caravan is a well-argued, utterly gripping examination of the folly that surrounds humanitarian aid. From the accounting tricks that allow wealthy western nations like the United States and Canada to claim that they give far more humanitarian aid than they actually do, to the sickeningly corporate and self-serving cultures that have overtaken NGOs around the world, the author spares only the victims of the aid in what is an all-encompassing and ruthless excoriation of aid culture. This is no polemic against generosity. The author never advocates that aid should be withheld from peoples in desperate need. On the contrary, the author claims that Western aid comes at such a cost to the people to whom it is given that it often loses its effectiveness. If the aid was injected directly into the economies of troubled nations, and not into the budgets of NGOs and the pockets of Western businesses promising to do good works in crisis zones, aid would not only help those directly in need, it would come at far more reasonable a pricetag to the nations trying to do good works.

Rarely has more been packed into so few pages. Completely compelling. Ms. Polman may well have a chip on her shoulder when it comes to NGOs, favoring their flaws while downplaying their virtues, but when their flaws are this apparent, this systemic, they deserve to be exposed to the light of truth. This rotten culture is a betrayal of the vbest of human ideals. Not good enough... (5/5 Stars)

Links by Nuruddin Farah

From The Week of October 10, 2011

Though Africa has been beset by conflict since the end of European colonialism, surely few of its nations have experienced as much mindless chaos, such nihilistic bloodshed, as Somalia. For decades now, this coastal nation has been plagued by conflict and torn apart by rapacious warlords grasping for power. Such is their grip that not even the earnest efforts of the UN appear to have soothed its national nightmare. In fact, with the rise to power of its sea-born pirates, it appears to have only emboldened its destructive forces. Few of Somalia's native sons are better able to authentically articulate this atavistic anarchy than Mr. Farah who, since taking up exile from his country in 1976, has written vividly, and at length, about his troubled homeland. And here, in Links he succeeds in giving his readers a glimpse into its burdens.

Jeebleh is a Somalian exile living in New York when he hears of his mother's death from old age in the country of his birth. Though he is an educated and successful man with a wife and two daughters, he nonetheless feels a powerful pull to return home to settle accounts with his mother's spirit. So, abandoning the stability and lawfulness of Western life, Jeebleh journeys back to war-torn Africa where he intends to contact his mother's housekeeper as a means of locating the dead woman's grave.

No sooner has he landed, then Jeebleh receives a crash course in Somalian nihilism. He witnesses a game played by teenaged punks wherein they target one of the many passengers disembarking a plane and shoot their victim in cold blood. In this, they are motivated by nothing more than sport, a momentary distraction from boredom. The incident profoundly affects Jeebleh who resolves to complete his business as swiftly as possible. But when he realizes that the brilliant niece of one of his oldest friends has been mysteriously kidnapped, events quickly spiral out of Jeebleh's control, sending the ill-prepared westerner barreling headlong towards a confrontation with one of the country's many, ruthless warlords.

Though Links is a moving expose of the existential challenges of Somalian life, of the disrepair of the Somalian state, and of the clan loyalties that complicate the former and exasperate the latter, Mr. Farah's two-dimensional characters fail to engage the reader's emotions. Part of this is clearly a deliberate choice on the part of Mr. Farah to convey the sense of numbness Somalians must cultivate as a self-defense mechanism against the horrors they are forced to witness on a daily basis. But the author fails to distinguish this numbness from the general flatness of his characters which leaves the reader feeling anesthetized to the drama taking place here. Make no mistake, Mr. Farah has penned a shocking and compelling portrait of Somalian life, capturing all of the damage that eventuates from a country devastated by warlords. However, if the reader cannot connect with any of the story's characters, then this chaos, no matter how superbly it is depicted, is all-but reduced to an academic exercise.

Linksis a deeply disturbing glimpse of the price of war and the extent to which exposure to it can dehumanize even the most civilized souls. It is also a compelling demonstration of the challenges faced by well-intentioned, foreign powers trying to affect positive change in a country whose customs they cannot understand. But while these are points well-made, Mr. Farah's inability to weld this onto anything like a gripping narrative prevents Links from becoming memorable fiction. I feel far more educated about Somalian life than I do entertained by an actual story. (2/5 Stars)

Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles

From The Week of August 21, 2011

It is a sad but universal maxim of human nature that we demonize that which we most fear. Be it the rise of the industrial might of Asia, or the influx of immigrant populations into our communities, or even the building of an Islamic community center near Ground 0, we all denigrate peoples and faiths, corporations and governments, because it helps to justify our prejudices. It is infinitely easier to indulge in thoughtless spite than it is to examine the ugly truths that linger behind our fear. For most of us, this ill will is internal, a mental monologue covered up by a veneer of politeness. But for those few among us who possess genuine power, bigotry can ignite wars from which some people never recover. So it is now; so it has ever been. It is a maxim to which the lost people of Carthage would surely testify.

Raised in what is now modern-day Tunis, Carthage was a powerful, north African state which plied the oceanic waters between Africa and Europe for much of the first millennium BCE. Though it is now best remembered for the mercilessness with which it was exterminated by the Roman Republic during the Third Punic War, Carthaginian power predated Roman might by centuries. In fact, for most of its history, Greek Syracuse was its chief rival and antagonist, not the Romans who would eventually annihilate it. A mighty naval power, Carthage was a magnet for wealth, successfully deploying a powerful, oligarchical council which guided it to Mediterranean prominence. But while its achievements enabled its expansion into Spain, Italy and Greece, it was also its downfall. For it stoked up in prideful and powerful Rome jealousy and envy for which the Roman character was ill-equipped to suffer.

Carthage Must Be Destroyed is, in the main, a treatise on the history of Carthage, the mythology of its founding in ninth century BCE, its rise to mercantile supremacy in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, its obliteration at the hands of the ruthless Roman Republic in the first century BCE, and the years between in which its great generals, its geographic advantages, and its entrepreneurial spirit made it an immensely successful civilization. But while Mr. Miles details, here, the history of this Phoenician society, now remembered for Hannibal, its greatest and most prodigal son, and for the Romans sowing salt into its soil, it is the fearfulness with which the Romans viewed Carthage that connects this ancient tale to the present day.

Want drives human action: want of stuff, want of emotion, want of power. And so, when Carthage dared to stand before the assembled might of Rome and demand that the Italian state recognize it as an equal, to treat with it on the terms of a worthy opponent, the want of Rome, to be the best, to have no equal, to be supreme in every way, drove it to commit genocide against Carthage, to refuse to stop until it was no more. For only then, in the destruction of an enemy, could the preeminence of the Roman Republic be truly declared.

This is an excellent and scholarly work. Mr. Miles is as detailed in his reconstruction of Carthaginian civilization as he is in sketching out the sociopolitical forces which tied the region together during its reign. But as much as this work teaches the reader about Carthage, it is surprisingly vague on the Roman side of the equation. Yes, there are brief descriptions of some important figures, Marcus Cato, whose famous quote gave this book its title, Fabius the Delayer who was so successful in fighting Hannibal, and Scipio Africanus, the man who eventually destroyed Carthage, but these figures seem like afterthoughts. Perhaps the author considers the Roman side of this story to have already been decisively told. Nonetheless, I required more.

There are lessons here, not only for humans individually but for powerful nations as well. You may, for awhile, assuage your fears by vanquishing those you consider your enemies, but ultimately those fears will end you. For the enemy is ultimately in your own character, not in those who are not like you. And if you must fight the enemy to prove your own worth, then you will only wind up annihilating yourself. (4/5 Stars)

Egypt On The Brink by Tarek Osman

From The Week of August 14, 2011

With luck, Egypt will soon be free. Empowered by a wave of young Egyptians who make up almost 70 percent of the country's population, the stifling statism that has, for the last 60 years, restricted their freedom and ripped away their opportunities for economic success may soon be drowned, replaced by an open democracy capable of building on its energetic and hungry youth to create a modern nation. But while we can remember the crowds that bravely filled Tahrir Square in the spring of 2011 and hail them as courageous revolutionaries who overthrew a crumbling dictatorship, there is only one way to have even a remote idea of what will replace Hosni Mubarak's security state. We must journey into the past and examine Egypt in the 20th century: its people, its governments, and the ideas that impelled both their successes and their failures. This Egypt On The Brink achieves with clarity and grace.

Published a year prior to the 2011 Arab Spring, this treatise from Mr. Osman, on 20th century Egypt, its politics, its economics and its religion, makes the Tahrir uprising seem like an inevitable outcome of 60 years of political corruption and societal decay. Who is responsible for this desolation? The three men who have hovered over Egyptian life since independence in the 1950s.

Gamal Abdel Nasser rose out of the fog of obscurity to guide his country away from British colonialism and into an ideological marriage with the USSR. Under Nasser, Egypt became a command economy that saw millions of impoverished Egyptians educated and welcomed into a new middleclass, dominated by the public sector. But when, in 1967, his plans to unite the Arab world under a single, pan-Arabic banner were crushed by Israel's shocking victory over the combined might of Egypt and its Arabic allies in the Six Day War, Nasser's reforms lost legitimacy, a reality which only hastened their decline into the bureaucratic stagnancy typical of Soviet-style economies.

Anwar Sadat, who succeeded Nasser by being the least offensive of the available options, not only abandoned the Nasser plan, he ran in the opposite direction. Politically and economically, Sadat embraced the West, implementing Al Infitah, a program of privatization which both enriched and ingratiated him to Egypt's elite. However, when Sadat's reforms only succeeded in cementing an Egyptian oligarchy, the millions of Egyptians who were elevated to the middleclass under Nasser were mercilessly dropped back down into poverty, creating widespread discontent. This discord crescendoed with Sadat's assassination in 1981.

Which brings us to Hosni Mubarak's 30-year dictatorship. Forever marked by the terror of being at Sadat's side when the president was killed during a military parade in Cairo, Mubarak left behind Nasser's socialism and Sadat's capitalism to carve out his own identity, the leader of a security state. He consolidated Sadat's oligarchy and kept faith with Israel and the United States while, at home, he cracked down hard on dissent, imprisoning his enemies and dissolving any forms of organized opposition to his authority. Unfortunately for the Egyptian people, Mr. Mubarak did not learn one of the major rules of human nature, that denying someone a thing, no matter its form, only makes him want it more. After a series of assassination attempts, Mubarak was overthrown in 2011 by the Tahrir revolt.

Egypt On The Brink is a marvelous and concise breakdown of the difficulties the Egyptian people have faced over the last seven decades in which they have been bounced from colonialism, to socialism, to capitalism, to the militarism. They have been the victims of a cruel game of political experimentation driven by the desire of three powerful men -- Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak -- to seize power and impose their ideologies upon their people. And so, while Mr. Osman has done a wonderful job elucidating the tragic march of Egyptian history, his greatest achievement here is to present to his readers a potent, systematic indictment of not only authoritarianism, but that form of political paternalism that infuses ambitious men with the misguided belief that they know best. We only needs look to Egypt to grasp the full cost of such folly.

This is riveting work, only marginally dated by the revolution that so quickly followed it. (4/5 Stars)

Riding The Desert Trail by Bettina Selby

From The Week of July 31, 2011

The great age of planetary exploration has passed into history. Ericson and Magellan, Shackleton and Hillary, Livingstone and Rondon... They and their brethren have mapped our oceans and summited our mountains; they've journeyed along our rivers and charted our caves. They have claimed all the earthly firsts that we consider worthy. But while ours may not be the age of firsts, the age of great adventures, it might well be the age of admiring those firsts, of looking back with our modern technology and our gift of hindsight and standing in awe of the achievements of those who did so much with so little. In Riding The Desert Trail, Ms. Selby has done more than stand in awe. She has re-traced one of the most epic of African adventures and, in doing so, given her readers a glimpse of both the African culture that hosted her and the singleminded drive to explore that impelled the great adventurers that preceded her.

In 1988, Ms. Selby, a writer and avid cyclist, set upon a long and dangerous journey. Traveling from her native England with only her bicycle, some diplomatic papers and a minimum amount of cash, she landed in Egypt with the intention of bicycling the full 4,500-mile length of the Nile valley. Inspired by Livingstone and Baker who, only a century earlier, had risked their lives to discover the source of the great river, she devoted the following few months of her life to adventuring from the smog of chaotic Cairo all the way to distant and war-torn Uganda in the hopes of completing an epic journey that, even a hundred years on from the age of adventure, remains difficult and dangerous.

The desolation of Sudan and the discord of Uganda would be treacherous challenges for natives to the region. For a lone, foreign woman to journey through this part of the world, a region that has never known, in living memory, the moderating hand of modern technology and organized education... The perils are obvious. And yet, supported by the sturdy bike beneath her and buoyed by the families along the way who generously gave of what little they had to aid her, Ms. Selby steered into the winds of risk and history to achieve, to see for her own eyes the mythical source of a river that has been feeding civilizazions for thousands of years.

Riding The Desert Trail is as much a memoir as it is a travel log. After all, it's difficult to write of such an epic journey without revealing much of ones own character. The middle-aged Selby possesses, here, the irrepressible curiosity of youth as, in this recount of her journey, she engagingly describes both the hostile terrain and the fascinating cultures that ply it with only occasional complaints about the physical and sociological roadblocks thrown up in her way. But as much as this work succeeds in its stated aims, of educating the reader about the heartland of Africa, its most powerful message is, to her, an afterthought. In the planning, the execution and the completion of her journey, Ms. Selby devoted months of time and energy, endured risk and hardship, for a single hour, to stand at the source of the Nile and take in its beauty and its history, months for just an hour to view beauty through ones own eyes... It may be that the age of planetary exploration has come and gone, But let us not for a moment think that the human spirit has lost its thirst to see, to experience and to know, to stand next to the history, of our people and our planet, just on the off chance that we can touch the past and the future.

A well-rounded tale marred only by its 1980s context which, from the second decade of the 21st century, is somewhat dated. (4/5 Stars)

Into Africa by Martin Dugard

From The Week of July 03, 2011

Though we sometimes chafe at its ubiquitousness and angst over its sensationalism, there can be no doubt that our world is better off for having a modern media. Its capacity to inform us about both the state of our world and the power of its prime movers allows us to be infinitely more educated about current affairs than any generation prior to the present. However, for all its good, the modern media does, in all its saturation, put an end to mysteries which, in the past, accrued enormous cultural significance as a direct result of their being impossible for the media to report on. No tale exemplifies this lost ignorance more than that of the lost adventurer who, having dropped off civilization's radar into the mists of the unknown, spends years in the wilderness, exploring, charting, engaging with new cultures while his many admirers back home fret over his absence and their lack of contact with him. Not only have most of our geographical frontiers been explored, satellites make such communication blackouts almost impossible. And thus, there may never again be another meeting like that which took place on October 27th, 1871, when the American newsman and explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, finally met the British missionary and expeditionist, Dr. David Livingstone in the depths of Africa, thousands of miles from the lights of civilization.

This vivid effort from Mr. Dugard is a dual biography which takes up, as its twin subjects, the life stories of Stanley and Livingstone. It reaches across decades in an effort to contextualize the famous meeting near Lake Tanganyika which forever connected newsman and Christian, sensationalist and explorer, rescuer and rescued. Though the two men receive equal treatment, it is Stanley's background that animates Into Africa. For while much is already known of the Scottish Livingstone and his exploratory sojourns through Africa which made him famous and inflamed his advocacy for the abolition of slavery as a Western practice, Henry Morton Stanley has remained something of a mystery. Orphaned young, Mr. Dugard burns off the many lies Stanley told about himself to reveal a complex figure who pursued Livingstone more out of personal gain than for any affinity or fondness for the man. After all, Stanley was a man of masks, a young and abused emigrant to America who, after being fostered for awhile by a successful family in New Orleans, found his way into the Confederate army during the American Civil War, only to be captured by Unionists and freed to fight for them against the South. Drifting through his own life, he caught on at the New York Herald, a popular newspaper of the period and eventually, thanks to a scandal which entangled President Grant, found himself charged with the ambitious task of finding Dr. Livingstone who, by 1870, was four years marooned in the jungles of Africa and long since believed dead by the West.

Though Stanley's background is more arresting, Dr. Livingstone's is not without its moments. Mr. Dugard paints a portrait of a man gripped by a powerful, Christian faith which, over a meritorious career, helped earn him fame and fortune as an adventurer, a chronicler of Africa, and a crusader against slavery. But no amount of success, professionally or privately, could sway him from an obsession to find the source of the Nile. It was this need to know which drove the then famous abolitionist back into Africa for a final and fateful five-year journey which culminated in the meeting with Stanley in 1871. The author describes a man who was so driven to see, to know, and to do, that his passion lead to his wife's demise at the hands of his Africa. What's more, he clearly sacrificed familiarity of his children to conquer both frontiers and iniquities which, as often as not, proved immune to his blows. A powerful and conflicted figure who, as a result of his fearlessness, his courage and his faith, was a national hero to the British Empire.

Interweaving the histories of these two men with the twin journeys which eventuated in their meeting on that fateful day, Mr. Dugard brings to life both his subjects and the times which shaped them. Though his account presumes to know a great deal about Henry Morton Stanley's psychological state, enough of the man's own writings are included here to back up the author's psychoanalysis. And so, though we may have left behind the era of the great adventure, we can relive them in literature and Mr. Dugard does not in the least disappoint with this chronicle of a famous and burdened explorer and the efforts of a troubled American to locate him at the end of the civilized world. (4/5 Stars)

Three Empires On The Nile by Dominic Green

From The Week of July 03, 2011

To the cost of millions who've suffered under its yoke, the world, particularly the West, has learned that colonialism is a euphemism for the systematic exploitation of the weak by the strong. Empowered by a belief in their own superiority, strong groups justified these subjections on the claim of necessity: that they required the resources held by weak groups, that weak groups were too ignorant to understand how best to utilize what they had, that weak groups needed to be properly civilized by the strong in order for them to think and behave properly. But while most forms of colonialism have been rightfully abolished, one of its most insidious tenets persists into the present. This practice concerns the grotesque manner in which the governments of strong groups help to prop up the tyrants of weak groups because it is politically and economically advantageous for them to do so. And it is precisely this manipulative power which pervades Mr. Green's account of the thirty years of political and social upheaval which beset Egypt from the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal to the end of the 19th century.

From the overthrow of the fiscally ruinous Khedive Ismail who ruled, as a playboy, over Egypt until 1879, to the zealous and nihilistic jihad prosecuted by the Mahdi and his followers in the 1880s, and to the final subjugation of rebellious elements by the British in the 1890s, Mr. Green escorts the reader on a sweeping exploration of Egypt and Sudan of the late 19th century. Exhibiting little of its former, pre-Christian glory, the region is rife with poverty and oppression, dominated by poorly educated peasants who have the misfortune of being ruled by the Turkish throne of the Ottoman empire. Perhaps, if the Khedive's rule had been moderately progressive, events would not have slipped his control to evolve into 30 years of bloody chaos. But after hailing Western Europe as the future, Khedive Ismail spent his country into oblivion, a calamity which not only necessitated his removal from power but provided the spiritual fuel by which Sudan went up in religious flames. It not only radicalized Muhammad Ahmad until he believed himself the Mahdi, Islam's prophesized redeemer of the Earth, it gave him an opportunity to recruit an army tens of thousands strong, an army which, in the name of ridding Egypt and Sudan of corruption and foreign influences, devoted the next ten years to turning the region into a war-torn wasteland.

But while the Khedive's failures gave rise to the annihilation of the Mahdi and his crusade, it also empowered men like Ahmed Urabi, the first Egyptian of the modern era to rise from the peasantry to force some kind of reform upon his incredibly corrupted country.

Three Empires On The Nile is full of war and chaos, politics and corruption, religion and devastation. Through men like Charles Gordon, the engineer and reformer, it explores the spirit of adventure and power that infused British life at the peak of its imperial powers. Through the Mahdi and his war, it elucidates the extent to which religious extremism is an outgrowth of poverty and oppression, and that such fundamentalism often ends up destroying the very thing it is suffering to save. Finally, through William Gladstone, the British Prime Minister of the period, it explains how the three Cs of the British empire, Christianity, Commerce and civilization, energized the empire's expansion and lead to its colonial entanglements in parts of the world it could not understand.

Mr. Green's excellent history is full of fascinating and profoundly flawed characters, explorers and drunkards, warriors and self-flagellators, zealots and martyrs, all of whom are set against the ancient world of Egypt and the burning sands of the Sudan. While its conclusion overreaches by attempting to connect these three tempestuous decades to more recent history, it is, in every other way, a wonderful examination of three of history's Cs, colonialism, corruption and change, the omnipresence of which have shaped our nations and our lives. Terrific work. (5/5 Stars)

Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela

From The Week of June 05, 2011

Domestic novels, examinations of a family and its trials and tribulations, have a mirror's power. They capture the commonalities, the prejudices and grudges, the loves and friendships, and reflect them back at us, offering the observant onlooker an opportunity to see his family in a different light. Structurally and imaginatively, these novels lack the intellectual challenge of speculative fiction; instead, they rely on the strength of their characters to reveal the truths about life and love that have been woven into the world around us. In this, Ms. Aboulela has penned a success, for its the extent to which the Abuzeid clan comes alive in her vision of 1950s Sudan that gives Lyrics Alley its punch.

In British-occupied Sudan, a country marked by vast inequities in income and opportunity, Mahmoud, the head of the affluent Abuzeid clan has everything he could want. Professionally, his thirst for respectability in the minds of the British has driven him to learn English, form wise business relationships with his country's Western overlords, and to begin to realize a vision of a modernized Sudan. Meanwhile, personally, Mahmoud, has four healthy children from two healthy wives. Nur and Nassir are his eldest, sons from his Sudanese wife, young adults who are set to inherit both their father's business and his vision. Farouk and Ferial are his youngest, the issue of his second, Egyptian wife, children of too few years to hold more than the hope of future success. But for all of Mahmoud's notable achievements, he cannot protect his family from the tragedy about to befall it. Nor can his formidable will keep fate's blow from opening up devastating fissures in its midst, turning wife against wife and son against son in a battle which will have consequences for more than just the Abuzeids.

Though Lyrics Alley is hobbled by an overburdened first act, marked by a plot yet to take off and by a host of characters yet to individuate, the final two-thirds of Ms. Aboulela's sweaty novel, its tragic politics, its stricken fathers, its beleaguered women, fill it up with a dark vitality. Many of its characters take their turns narrating their histories, but Nur, the most promising of Mahmoud's sons, steals the show. His longing to give up in the face of tragedy, to surrender to a world too ignorant to accept him, is as realistic as his bouts of poetic output are beautiful. Nur is the sun around which the story's characters orbit, his fight defining their lives, their actions, their emotions. But as much as Nur transforms the piece, the plight of his tutor, Ustaz, is our teacher. It's through his working-class struggles that we come to understand the poverty of the Arab world: its disrespect for education and enlightenment, its obsession with religion, and the cost it has paid as a result of meddlesome, Western colonialism.

This is a novel lit by poetry and shadowed by pettiness and cruelty. It is the story of a family and a nation in the midst of the most transformative century in human history. It is an examination of how one event, one moment in time, can rewrite the destinies of dozens of people. Ms. Aboulela has a keen eye for life's tiny but telling details and it is this, coupled with her compelling portrait of life during a difficult time, that turn Lyrics Alley from a slog into a delight. (4/5 Stars)

Blood River by Tim Butcher

From The Week of August 01, 2010

There is simply no way to measure the toll in human suffering exacted by imperialism. Put your finger on a map of the world; chances are, it will land near or on a country that has been convulsed by colonial rule, either in the giving or the receiving. It's taken centuries for Latin America to recover from Spanish rule, while Asia, though economically better off, isn't doing much better coming out from under the British. But of all the continents to have been plagued by this most rapacious of monarchical externalities, Africa has suffered the most. Perhaps it was that they had no history of a civil society to fall back on when colonialism finally ran its course. Perhaps the crimes of the Germans and the Dutch, the British and the Belgian, were simply too grievous to return from. No matter the cause, much of Africa's torment is directly attributable to European influence and nowhere is this more true than the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Mr. Butcher, a British journalist, something of an insane adventurer, took it upon himself to re-trace the path of Henry Morton Stanley's trans-African journey. Though much of the distance is traveled by boat on the Congo river, the gruelling overland trek Mr. Butcher endures is both harrowing and astonishing, as he contends with unreliable guides, dangerous mercenaries, monstrous insects and killer viruses to complete a most remarkable odyssey. Why remarkable? Despite the passage of some 140 years, it was barely any easier for Mr. Butcher to complete the mission than it was for his predecessor, Stanley. A hundred and fourty years, in which the Western world went from horses to airplanes, from wagons to Ferraris and, here, nothing has changed. Mr. Butcher describes in heartbreaking detail how much of the environment Stanley would recognize. In fact, in many ways, it is in even greater disrepair now than it was a century ago, as the more modern conveniences of railroad tracks have succumbed to the oblivion of disuse. Along the way, Mr. Butcher describes the people he encounters, inspiring and sinister, while acting as tour guide for the reader uneducated in the area's history. The scars left by the Belgian overlords lingers on in one of the most lawless places left on Earth.

Mr. Butcher's portrait of a failed nation is moving and disturbing. Though he lacks Megan Stack's lyricism, the raw emotion is similar as he tests the limits of his mental and physical endurance in a place antithetical to human civilization. This is a monument to anti-imperialism, a 350 page attack on the price of interfering in another society's affairs. Who knows what Africa might have been without Western arrogance. We'll never know for now it is the continent of the gun. And we well know how much damage the uneducated can do with that most devastating of human inventions. (4/5 Stars)