Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

Installment #3 in the Sad Book Series: Strength in What Remains tells the story of a Burundi man (Burundian?) who flees his country after brutal ethnic violence erupts and arrives in New York City with $200, no English, but plenty of smarts, persistence, half of a medical degree, and the wonderful first name of DeoGratias [...]

Onitsha by Jean-Marie Le Clezio

Onitsha is the story of a boy raised by his mother in France and Italy who travels to Nigeria with his mother to finally meet his English father, who works as a bureaucrat for a British company but longs to study the historical migration from Egypt to Nigeria. The first third of the book describes [...]

This Child will be Great by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

This Child Will Be Great is the memoir of the current president of Liberia, elected after years of chaos and corruption presided over by a series of president-dictators with the brutal, depressingly familiar manners of dictators the world over (including arrests and prison for the author.) As in often the case the dictators’ exactions were [...]

The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton

An idealistic New York librarian lands in Kenya wanting to bring literacy to the people. It will be from a camel since reaching the desert nomads cannot be done in any other way, hence the title,  The Camel Bookmobile. She falls in love with the tribe, its village, its children, and with a particularly fetching [...]

A Guide to the Birds of East Africa by Nicholas Drayson

A Guide to the Birds of East Africa is not a bird book, although you can learn a lot about marabous and hadadas via the story and the drawings that herald each chapter. But there is a bird counting contest (see here and here for others), although its point is to gain a lady’s affection rather [...]

Sizwe’s test by Jonny Steinberg

Sizwe’s Test talks about AIDS and AIDS treatment in Africa through the eyes of an apparently healthy, successful (very) small businessman who guides the author through South Africa’s patchy and overwhelmed medical infrastructure, assisted by Medecin Sans Frontieres without which there would not be much of a program at all, at least in the area [...]