Book Review

AllAfrica News: Book Listings and Reviews

• Uganda: Bringing History to the Present
  [Monitor] Richard Blake's novel The Sword of Damascus, has now been published in paperback by Hodder & Stoughton.
  
  
• Sierra Leone: Fixing Failed States - A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World, What Lessons are There for Country?
  [Concord] In the Fixing Failed States Book by Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart, the attention of nations and the international community is brought to the realization and the need to be self-critical of the continued national and global insecurity caused by unresolved capability issues in states to supply basic public services to their people.
  
  
• Africa: Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership by Erica R. Edwards
  [UMP] How a preoccupation with charismatic leadership in African American culture has influenced literature from World War I to the present
  
  
• Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe
  [The Herald] I first bought a Peter Godwin book, "Mukiwa", on June 21, 1997, in Sacramento, California. I was an employee at Borders, and I remember bragging to co-workers about how I had just discovered yet another African writer in the store's stock. Those were the days when you had to scour shelves for months, looking for African books that never seemed to show up, so you were then tempted to buy a second copy of "Things Fall Apart" (we got an employee discount).
  
  
• Rwanda: In Darkness By Nick Lake
  [New Times] "Shorty" is a Haitian boy trapped in the ruins of a hospital when the earth explodes around him. Surrounded by lifeless bodies and growing desperately weak from lack of food and water, death seems imminent.
  
  
• Zimbabwe: Crocodile That Ate Country
  [Observer] The Mashona of Zimbabwe say that a solar eclipse is caused by angered ancestors. Other southern African peoples like the Zulus and the Venda believe that it occurs when "a crocodile eats the sun"
  
  
• Swaziland: New Book Details Nation's Struggle for Democracy
  [Swazi Media] The End of the Beginning? 2011, a year in the struggle for freedom in Swaziland by Richard Rooney is a new book published today and available free-of-charge online. You can read on screen or download it to your computer to print out.
  
  
• Botswana: Saturday Is for Funerals
  [PlusNews] Johannesburg - One part novella and two parts textbook, Saturday is for Funerals* pairs the recollections of Unity Dow, five-times author and Botswana's first female high-court judge, with the analysis of Harvard health sciences professor, virologist and chair of the Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute, Max Essex.
  
  
• Kenya: Photos Depicting Political Wrongs
  [Nairobi Star] An enriching book has been recently published, the work of two remarkable creative artists, Betty Press and Annetta Miller.
  
  
• Uganda: Manifesto of a Benevolent Billionaire
  [Independent] Title: Screw Business as Usual
  
  
• Rwanda: Big Girl By Danielle Steel
  [New Times] In this heartfelt and incisive novel, Danielle Steel celebrates the virtues of unconventional beauty while exploring deeply resonant issues of weight, self-image, sisterhood, and family.
  
  
• Uganda: More Than Medical School
  [Observer] In 2003 Ross Donaldson, an American medical student, arrives in Sierra Leone. The country had been at war since 1992, with the Freetown government fighting the Rebel United Front.