Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa - Couverture souple

Stearns, Jason

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1610391071 ISBN 13 : 9781610391078

Editeur : PublicAffairs, 2012

Synopsis

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters Presents a portrait of Africa's Great War. This title shows how Congo became a failed state that, rocked by violence arising from the aftermath of the genocide in neighboring Rwanda, collapsed into a war of retaliatory massacres of extraordinary brutality. Full description

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

An Economist and Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year


"He is a cracking writer, with a wry sense of understatement... Mr. Stearns has spoken to everyone-villagers, child soldiers, Mobutu's commanders, Kabila's ministers, Rwandan intelligence officers. In these conversations he found gold, bringing clarity-and humanity-to a place that usually seems inexplicable and barbaric. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters is riveting and certain to become essential reading for anyone looking to understand Central Africa."―Douglas Rogers, The Wall Street Journal

"The best account [of the conflict in the Congo] so far; more serious than several recent macho-war-correspondent travelogues, and more lucid and accessible than its nearest competitor. . . . [Stearns] has lived in the country, and has done a raft of interviews with people who witnessed what happened before he got there... his picture is clear, made painfully real by a series of close-up portraits."
―Adam Hochschild, The New York Times Book Review

"Enter Jason Stearns. One of Congo's most intrepid observers, he describes the war from the point of view of its perpetrators. He has tracked down and interviewed a rogue's gallery of them. The resulting book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, is a tour de force, though not for the squeamish."
―The Washington Post

"[Stearns] is probably the most widely traveled and the most meticulous and empathetic observer of the war there. This is a serious book about the social and political forces behind one of the most violent clashes of modern times-as well as a damn good read."―The Economist

"A serious, admirably balanced account of the crisis and the political and social forces behind it, providing vivid portraits of both victims and perpetrators and eyewitness accounts of the main events... perhaps the most accessible, meticulously researched and comprehensive overview of the Congo crisis yet."
―Financial Times

"[A] tremendous book. This is a very complicated, largely unfamiliar subject that's basically off the radar of the American media and he's managed to produce a genuinely readable and engrossing account. To the extent that it's possible to breeze through a book about a years-long bloody civil war I breezed right through it."
―Matthew Yglesias, ThinkProgress.org

"The subject he has tackled is vast and impossible to cover in one book. But for anyone interested in the Congo and the Great Lakes region this is a great read-one I highly recommend."―Stephanie Wolters, Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg)

"Perhaps the best account of the most recent conflict in the Congo."―Foreign Policy

"A brave and accessible take on the leviathan at the heart of so many of Africa's problems . . . Stearns's eye for detail, culled from countless interviews, brings this book alive . . . I once wrote that the Congo suffers from 'a lack of institutional memory,' meaning that its atrocities well so inexorably that nobody bothers to keep an account of them. Stearns's book goes a long way to putting that right."―The Telegraph

Présentation de l'éditeur :

At the heart of Africa is Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal and unstaunchable war in which millions have died. And yet, despite its epic proportions, it has received little sustained media attention. In this deeply reported book, Jason Stearns vividly tells the story of this misunderstood conflict through the experiences of those who engineered and perpetrated it. He depicts village pastors who survived massacres, the child soldier assassin of President Kabila, a female Hutu activist who relives the hunting and methodical extermination of fellow refugees, and key architects of the war that became as great a disaster asand was a direct consequence ofthe genocide in neighbouring Rwanda. Through their stories, he tries to understand why such mass violence made sense, and why stability has been so elusive. Through their voices, and an astonishing wealth of knowledge and research, Stearns chronicles the political, social, and moral decay of the Congolese State.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: PublicAffairs
• Date d'édition: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1610391071
• ISBN 13: 9781610391078
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 416