The Village of Waiting
10 best books like The Village of Waiting (George Packer): Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman, The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa, Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa's Fragile Edge, Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival, Somebody's Heart Is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa, Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village, Born in the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival, Where We Have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe, Rainbow's End: A Memoir of Childhood, War and an African Farm
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---...
Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman
| Author | Mpho M'Atsepo Nthunya |
A compelling and unique autobiography by an African woman with little formal education, less privilege, and almost no experience of books or writing. Mpho's voice is a voice almost never heard in literature or history, a voice from within the struggle of "ordinary" African women to negotiate a world...
| Author | Josh Swiller |
| ISBN | 0805082107 |
A young man's quest to reconcile his deafness in an unforgiving world leads to a remarkable sojourn in a remote African village that pulsates with beauty and violence
These are hearing aids. They take the sounds of the world and amplify them." Josh Swiller recited this speech to himself on the...
| 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...
Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival
| Author | Alicia Partnoy |
| ISBN | 1573440299 |
Alicia is a survivor of the Argentine dictatorship of the 1970's who was taken without legal process to a secret prison and tortured there. In Argentina these secret prisons are often called "concentration camps" but to me that term is being used for emotional weight and is inaccurate. Camps are open...
| Author | Tanya Shaffer |
| ISBN | 1400032598 |
“It's my life, and if I want to run from it I can,” quips Tanya Shaffer. An incorrigible wanderer, Shaffer has a habit of fleeing domesticity for the joys and rigors of the open road. This time her destination is Ghana, and what results is a transformative year spent roaming the African continent....
| Author | Sarah Erdman |
| ISBN | 0312423128 |
The village of Nambonkaha in the Ivory Coast is a place where electricity hasn't yet arrived, where sorcerers still conjure magic, where the tok-tok sound of women pounding corn fills the morning air like a drumbeat. As Sarah Erdman enters the social fold of the village as a Peace Corps volunteer, she...
Born in the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival
| Author | Fadumo Korn |
| ISBN | 1558615318 |
This powerful memoir portrays the life-altering transformation of a feisty nomad girl who undergoes genital excision. Crippled with rheumatism as a result of the cutting, Fadumo Korn, who once freely roamed the deserts of her native Somalia, is sent to live with a wealthy uncle, brother to the...
Where We Have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
| Author | Andrew Meldrum |
| ISBN | 0802142516 |
Where We Have Hope is the gripping memoir of a young American journalist. In 1980, Andrew Meldrum arrived in a Zimbabwe flush with new independence, and he fell in love with the country and its optimism. But over the twenty years he lived there, Meldrum watched as President Robert Mugabe consolidated...
Rainbow's End: A Memoir of Childhood, War and an African Farm
| Author | Lauren St. John |
| ISBN | 0743286790 |
This is a story about a paradise lost. . . . About an African dream that began with a murder . . .In 1978, in the final, bloodiest phase of the Rhodesian civil war, eleven-year-old Lauren St John moves with her family to Rainbow's End, a wild, beautiful farm and game reserve set on the banks of a slowflowing...
Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa
| Author | Katherine A. Dettwyler |
This personal account by a biocultural anthropologist illuminates not-soon-forgotten messages involving the sobering aspects of fieldwork among malnourished children in West Africa. With nutritional anthropology at its core, Dancing Skeletons presents informal, engaging, and oftentimes...
| Author | Gilbert Tuhabonye |
| ISBN | 0060817534 |
Gilbert Tuhabonye is a survivor. More than ten years ago, he lay buried under a pile of burning bodies. The centuries–old battle between Hutu and Tutsi tribes had come to Gilbert's school. Fueled by hatred, the Hutus forced more than a hundred Tutsi children and teachers into a small room and used machetes...
| 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...
My impression of Peace Corps memoirs, before reading this book, was not good. This seems to be recognized as one of the better ones, and as an engaging, perceptive memoir with a strong writing style, it certainly exceeded my expectations.
Tidwell spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in...
| 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...
Hailed by Bill Bryson and the New York Times Book Review as a rising star among travel writers, Jeffrey Tayler penetrates one of the most isolated, forbidding regions on earth--the Sahel. This lower expanse of the Sahara, which marks the southern limit of Islam’s reach in West and Central Africa,...
| Author | Robert Calderisi |
| ISBN | 0300120176 |
After years of frustration at the stifling atmosphere of political correctness surrounding discussions of Africa, long time World Bank official Robert Calderisi speaks out. He boldly reveals how most of Africa's misfortunes are self-imposed, and why the world must now deal differently with the...
All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo
| Author | Bryan Mealer |
| ISBN | 1596913452 |
In 1996, the fighting in Rwanda spilled over the Congolese border, sparking a conflict that would eventually claim more lives than any other since the Second World War. In the course of his three years as a reporter in Congo, Bryan Mealer was the witness often the only witness to almost unimaginable scenes:...
The Panama Hat Trail: A Journey from South America
| Author | Tom Miller |
| ISBN | 0792263863 |
Next week I leave for a trip to Ecuador, so naturally I wanted to read something to put me in the mindset of a country I've never visited.
This book, while perhaps a bit dated by 2017 (we'll see once I get there), does a great job of exploring every step in the long process of turning Ecuadoran straw...
| Author | Peace Corps |
| ISBN | 0964447266 |
Twenty-eight first-person stories, recount the unique experience of being a Peace Corps Volunteer. Compelling, inspiring, sometimes funny, often poignant, these stories represent the breadth of Peace Corps work, the countries it serves, and its Volunteer diversity. Together, the stories...
Little Boys Come from the Stars
| Author | Emmanuel Dongala |
| ISBN | 0385721226 |
Sardonic, subtle, and sweetly scathing, Little Boys Come from the Stars is satire at its best.
Set in an unnamed country in equatorial Africa, it tells the story of Michel, a precocious teen dubbed Matapari (“trouble”) because of his extraordinary birth. Though his father is a reclusive...
| Author | Moritz Thomsen |
| ISBN | 0295969288 |
this was the one of MANY peace corps memoirs i suffered through (reading material choices were limited to our paltry communal bookshelves in the volunteer lounge of the swaziland peace corps office).
anyway, i used to write a monthly literature review box or our volunteer newsletter, and one month...
| Author | P.W. Singer |
| ISBN | 0520248767 |
From U.S. soldiers having to fight children in Afghanistan and Iraq to juvenile terrorists in Sri Lanka to Palestine, the new, younger face of battle is a terrible reality of 21st century warfare. Indeed, the very first American soldier killed by hostile fire in the “War on Terrorism” was shot by...
| Author | Edoardo Nesi |
| ISBN | 8845263525 |
“Il rumore di una tessitura
ti fa socchiudere gli occhi e sorridere,
come quando si corre mentre nevica.
Il rumore della tessitura
non si ferma mai,
ed è il canto
più antico della nostra città,
e ai bambini pratesi
fa da ninna nanna.”
“Questa...
Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey
| Author | Fergal Keane |
| ISBN | 0140247602 |
When President Habyarimana’s jet was shot down in April 1994, Rwanda erupted into a hundred-day orgy of killing – which left up to a million dead. Fergal Keane travelled through the country as the genocide was continuing, and his powerful analysis reveals the terrible truth behind the headlines.
‘A...
