RaveThe Times (UK)This superb book tells their entwined story, an epic tale of blood, bitterness and betrayal. On the human level, it is an absorbing Shakespearean saga in which this duo shape the history of their continent before their falling out, which led to a squalid death in a South African hotel room in the final hours of 2013. Michela Wrong, among the sharpest western writers on Africa, uses the murder of Rwanda’s affable spy chief Patrick Karegeya as a device to dissect the ugly reign of Paul Kagame, the geeky gangster president accused of being behind his former schoolmate’s death ... It is a gripping tale, centred on two contrasting characters, that starts in Uganda among Rwanda’s exiles ... Yet this interwoven story of two fascinating men is much more than a smart device to tell the tale of another African rebel leader who festered in power, even if it is a riveting account of raw power turned rancid. Wrong, the author of fine books on Eritrea, Kenya and the Congo, challenges the tatty conventional narrative on the 1994 genocide, with its simplistic notion of triumphant Tutsi good guys led by the heroic national saviour returning from exile. She exposes a more complex and tawdry story, showing the savagery that lies below the smooth surface of a regime hailed by many Western admirers.
Ed Caesar
PositiveThe Spectator (UK)... engrossing ... [Caesar] has delivered a lovely book despite the paucity of some source material ... Caesar skillfully sketches out the early missions, often involving men who fought on the Western Front. The thirst for adventure was a patriotic duty, he writes, but also an attempt to find enlightenment for these men by testing themselves in the most unforgiving places on Earth ... Credit to Caesar for rescuing such a splendid tale of an engaging maverick from the footnotes of Everest history.
Anjan Sundaram
RaveThe Guardian...a superb exposé of a dictatorship as he [Sundaram] observes how the tentacles of totalitarianism squeeze the life from a society ... Bad News is an important book that should shatter any lingering faith people might hold in Kagame’s hideous regime.
Ben Rawlence
RaveThe Guardian...a superb work that highlights the essential humanity of those faceless masses buffeted by events and desperately seeking salvation in one of the world’s most troubled spots ... This is a highly readable book. It is also a damning indictment of the hypocrisy behind camps, which offer such a pat solution to refugee crises for aid agencies and politicians
