The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working
10 best books like The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working (Robert Calderisi): The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain, 1789-1837, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Darfur: A Short History of a Long War, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda, Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa's Fragile Edge, The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS, The Road to Hell, Tropical Gangsters: One Man's Experience with Development and Decadence in Deepest Africa, Looking for Lovedu: A Woman's Journey Through Africa
| Author | Ben Wilson |
| ISBN | 1594201161 |
Ben Wilson's "The Making of Victorian Values" is the history of an era rather like our own-a time when dissenters and rebels were hemmed in by conformists and hardheaded authoritarians, a time when a nation on the eve of global domination fretted about its future. It was, however, a period when those...
Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide
| Author | Gérard Prunier |
| ISBN | 0801446023 |
A quick but razor-sharp analysis of the slaughter and ongoing quasi-genocide in Darfur, the impoverishd western areas of the Sudan. Like Prunier's "Africa's World War" about the Congo Wars after 1996, you'll have to keep the glossary at hand to keep track of the political parties and militias involved---...
A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa
| Author | Howard W. French |
| ISBN | 1400030277 |
In A Continent for the Taking Howard W. French, a veteran correspondent for The New York Times, gives a compelling firsthand account of some of Africa’s most devastating recent history–from the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, to Charles Taylor’s arrival in Monrovia, to the genocide in Rwanda and the...
Darfur: A Short History of a Long War
| Author | Alex de Waal |
| ISBN | 1842776975 |
In the predominantly Kobe village of Girgira close to the Chad border, local people said that Antonovs, gunships, troops, and militia from West Darfur killed 148 people in January 2004. [the quote relates the story of one woman who was held and raped for 7 days, whose handicapped brother was shot and...
Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda
| Author | Michael Barnett |
| ISBN | 0801488672 |
Why was the UN a bystander during the Rwandan genocide? Do its sins of omission leave it morally responsible for the hundreds of thousands of dead? Michael Barnett, who worked at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations from 1993 to 1994, covered Rwanda for much of the genocide. Based on his first-hand experiences,...
| Author | William Powers |
| ISBN | 1582346445 |
"A haunting account of one man's determination and the struggles of a people living in a deeply troubled country."--Booklist
When William Powers went to Liberia as a fresh-faced aid worker in 1999, he was given the mandate to "fight poverty and save the rainforest." It wasn't long before Powers...
The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS
| Author | Helen C. Epstein |
| ISBN | 0374281521 |
In 1993, Helen Epstein, a scientist working with a biotechnology company searching for an AIDS vaccine, moved to Uganda, where she witnessed firsthand the suffering caused by the epidemic. Now, in her unsparing and illuminating account of this global disease, she describes how international health...
| Author | Michael Maren |
| ISBN | 0743227867 |
Michael Maren's book is simply brilliant in its exhaustive research and compassion and perspective. When the book was written in 1997, the author had already spent nineteen years in Africa – in Kenya, Somalia, Burkina faso, Rwanda and Ethiopia – reporting on the famine, civil war and military...
| Author | Robert Klitgaard |
| ISBN | 0465087604 |
I'm not really sure why I enjoyed this book so much; the author talked a lot about economic restructuring/ governmental organization/ etc (snore). But, every time it threatened to get bogged down, he redirected his focus to the people, culture, and natural beauty of the country. He came away from his...
| Author | Ann Jones |
| ISBN | 0375705333 |
The adventure began when a young British photographer, Kevin Muggleton, suggested driving from one end of Africa to the other–“You know, the old ‘Cape to Cairo’ sort of thing.” For the renowned feminist writer Ann Jones, it soon became an expedition with a mission: to find the legendary...
| Author | Robert D. Kaplan |
| ISBN | 1400034523 |
Robert D. Kaplan is one of our leading international journalists, someone who can explain the most complicated and volatile regions and show why they’re relevant to our world. In Surrender or Starve, Kaplan illuminates the fault lines in the Horn of Africa, which is emerging as a crucial region for...
| Author | Basil Davidson |
| ISBN | 0812922107 |
This book is subtitled "Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State", but I assume that this was added by a timid publisher, afraid that the more accurate subtitle "Africa and the Curse of Imperialism" would make the book less salable. It would nonetheless have better expressed Davidson's argument, for...
In "a gripping narrative that is all but impossible to put down" (Joseph C. Miller), Histories of the Hanged exposes the long-hidden colonial crimes of the British in Kenya. This groundbreaking work tells how the brutal war between the colonial government and the insurrectionist Mau Mau between 1952...
Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror
Beginning with the chaotic post–World War I landscape in which religious belief was one way of reordering a world knocked off its axis, Sacred Causes is a penetrating critique of how religion has often been camouflaged by politics. All the bloody regimes and movements of the 20th century are masterfully...
The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa
| Author | Adam Roberts |
| ISBN | 1586483714 |
Equatorial Guinea is a tiny country roughly the size of the state of Maryland. Humid, jungle covered, and rife with unpleasant diseases, natives call it Devil Island. Its president in 2004, Obiang Nguema, had been accused of cannibalism, belief in witchcraft, mass murder, billiondollar corruption,...
The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa
| Author | Bill Berkeley |
| ISBN | 0465006426 |
Since 1983 journalist Bill Berkeley has traveled through Africa's most troubled lands-Rwanda, Liberia, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, and Zaire-seeking out the tyrants and military leaders who orchestrate seemingly intractable wars. Shattering the myth that ancient tribal hatred lies at the...
Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil
| Author | John Ghazvinian |
| ISBN | 0151011389 |
Although Africa has long been known to be rich in oil, extracting it hadn’t seemed worth the effort and risk until recently. But with the price of Middle Eastern crude oil skyrocketing and advancing technology making reserves easier to tap, the region has become the scene of a competition between...
| Author | Wangari Maathai |
| ISBN | 0307377407 |
Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, offers a refreshingly unique perspective on the challenges facing Africa, even as she calls for a moral revolution among Africans themselves, who, she argues, are culturally deracinated, adrift between worlds.
The...
| Author | Michela Wrong |
| ISBN | 0007241968 |
Speaking of my own country, there goes a lot I know only in skimpy details. Thanks to this book, I delved into a deeper understanding of stuff I used to see in the news (and let pass disinterestedly) when I was in High School. Grand corruption has happened in Kenya, and still happens. And to my understanding,...
The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?
| Author | Linda Polman |
| ISBN | 0805092900 |
A no-holds-barred, controversial exposé of the financial profiteering and ambiguous ethics that pervade the world of humanitarian aid
A vast industry has grown up around humanitarian aid: a cavalcade of organizations?some 37,000?compete for a share of the $160 billion annual prize, with "fact-inflation"...
Another Day in Paradise: International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories
Sudan, Rwanda, Somalia, Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Gaza Strip... Places that evoke scenes of unimaginable suffering and hardship, the human condition at its worst. But they are also places that highlight humanity at its best -- the capacity for generosity, self-sacrifice, and compassion. Among...
World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It
Since the financial crisis of 2008, many of us have had to reexamine our beliefs about markets and globalization. How integrated should economies really be? How much regulation is right?
Many people fuse these two dimensions of choice into one, either favoring both globalization and deregulation—or...
The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics
| Author | William Easterly |
| ISBN | 0262550423 |
Why economists' attempts to help poorer countries improve their economic well-being have failed.
Since the end of World War II, economists have tried to figure out how poor countries in the tropics could attain standards of living approaching those of countries in Europe and North America....
Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail
| Author | Paul Polak |
| ISBN | 1576754499 |
Based on his 25 years of experience, Polak explodes what he calls the "Three Great Poverty Eradication Myths": that we can donate people out of poverty, that national economic growth will end poverty, and that Big Business, operating as it does now, will end poverty. Polak shows that programs based...
