RaveThe AtlanticA new work pulling together the material was overdue. Having trawled through United States and United Nations archives; accessed declassified memos and cables, private letters, and unpublished documents; and interviewed Lumumba’s surviving family members, Reid has brought welcome narrative coherence to a globe-spanning, multilayered story. He manages a difficult balancing act, serving up the detail that will satisfy experts while providing the dramatic tension and character analysis craved by the general reader. Despite the story’s complexity, one’s attention never wanders ... When it comes to drama, Reid had quality ingredients to work with.
Jonny Steinberg
RaveThe Times (UK)\"Jonny Steinberg’s gripping portrait of Africa’s most famous romantic couple may well dispel the last scraps of that fuzzy complacency ... The most nuanced of storytellers, Steinberg has always had an extraordinary ability to get inside his protagonists’ heads, and does so here while scrupulously detailing the brutalising pressures to which the two were relentlessly subjected, experiences that left them warped and hardened. But the final portrait is nonetheless devastating, and some readers will put down the book feeling they might have preferred not to know.\
Dipo Faloyin
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... a stereotype Faloyin is bent on examining and demolishing, a task he carries out with verve ... It’s a well-worn path ... But I enjoyed learning about the debate among the Black Panther actors over which accent the inhabitants of the mythical Wakanda should adopt. Faloyin’s critique of museums in North America and Europe, which find endless excuses not to return looted artifacts to Africa, many of which are not even on display, also won me over ... And it’s impossible not to relish a book that boasts an entire section on jollof rice ... But while Faloyin excels at articulating the complaint, he has little to offer as a remedy to a problem rooted in a centuries-old global power imbalance. Fairness dictates, too, a recognition that intellectual laziness is hardly the white man’s exclusive preserve. People in Africa are just as prone to perpetuating sweeping stereotypes: about those in other parts of the continent, and also about life in the West, whose inhabitants are assumed to be universally prosperous and upper-class ... The difference, of course, is that while an African’s failure to perceive a Westerner’s \'complex identity\' has little impact on the latter’s daily existence, the Westerner’s assumption that Africa is all lions and spear-brandishing Maasai helps keep the aspirations of 1.4 billion people squashed.
Mondiant Dogon
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... poignant ... Notwithstanding the brutality he describes, Dogon’s tale possesses a beguiling delicacy. We never lose sight of his humanity, even if he often doubts it himself ... As he reminds himself, for every neighbor who used the post-genocide turmoil as an opportunity to loot and rape, there was a local villager, a stranger on the road, who warned his family members of approaching danger, hid them at great personal risk and treated their wounds. Scrupulously recorded, these are the moments that restore his — and his readers’ — faith in mankin ... This book beautifully captures the colossal waste that the refugee experience — essentially a state of suspended animation — represents ... Dogon’s own story closes with a possibility of Rwandan citizenship, but it is far from assured. Reality rarely offers the neatness of happy endings. Flotsam and jetsam of the modern world, refugees are engaged in a dogged battle to endow a modicum of dignity to lives over which they exert almost no control. Dogon rises to that challenge far better than most of us would.
