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The Rift
A New Africa Breaks Free
Contributors
By Alex Perry
Formats and Prices
Price
$30.00Price
$36.00 CADFormat
Format:
- Hardcover $30.00 $36.00 CAD
- ebook $15.99 $20.99 CAD
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A vivid, powerful, and controversial look at how the world gets Africa wrong, and how a resurgent Africa is forcing it to think again.
Africa has long been misunderstood — and abused — by outsiders. Correspondent Alex Perry traveled the continent for most of a decade, meeting with entrepreneurs and warlords, professors and cocaine smugglers, presidents and jihadis. Beginning with a devastating investigation into a largely unreported war crime-in 2011, when the US and the major aid agencies helped cause a famine in which 250,000 Somalis died-he finds Africa at a moment of furious self-assertion. To finally win their freedom, Africans must confront three last false prophets-Islamists, dictators and aid workers-who would keep them in their bonds.
Beautifully written, intimately reported, and sure to spark debate, The Rift passionately argues that a changing Africa revolutionizes our ideas of it, and of ourselves.
Africa has long been misunderstood — and abused — by outsiders. Correspondent Alex Perry traveled the continent for most of a decade, meeting with entrepreneurs and warlords, professors and cocaine smugglers, presidents and jihadis. Beginning with a devastating investigation into a largely unreported war crime-in 2011, when the US and the major aid agencies helped cause a famine in which 250,000 Somalis died-he finds Africa at a moment of furious self-assertion. To finally win their freedom, Africans must confront three last false prophets-Islamists, dictators and aid workers-who would keep them in their bonds.
Beautifully written, intimately reported, and sure to spark debate, The Rift passionately argues that a changing Africa revolutionizes our ideas of it, and of ourselves.
Genre:
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Praise for The RiftDouglas Rogers, author of The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
"An epic, rich, endlessly surprising narrative of a fast-changing Africa by one of the few Western journalists to have spent enough time there to understand it. Calls to mind the best African writing of Ryszard Kapuscinski."
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"In this stunning book about the past, present, and future of Africa, foreign correspondent Perry (who's written for Time and Newsweek) achieves the seemingly impossible: he writes about the continent from a Western perspective without trying to define Africa to the West. The stories he tells, of average Africans trying to carve out a better life, have the vividness of fiction. Candid, smart, and self-aware, this work is an impressive accomplishment that does more to give Western readers context for Africa's current condition than any book in recent memory."Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
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"Exploring modern Africa in all of its complexities...Perry's arguments about the often deleterious effects of outsiders augment some of the scholarly literature by providing a human face to usually well-intentioned but misguided interlopers. A welcome addition to our understanding of Africa."Kirkus Reviews
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"The Rift is an immensely readable, shocking and important book. It challenges readers to think about how we relate to a changing continent, the suffering around us, and what it means to do good in the world."Shelf Awareness
- On Sale
- Nov 17, 2015
- Page Count
- 448 pages
- Publisher
- Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN-13
- 9780316333771
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