The book review:

This complex story uses the death of a prominent Ugandan chief at the hands of Idi Amin’s henchmen in 1972 as a mechanism to explore current Ugandan history along with the larger issue of justice. What is justice and who can obtain it or not and how? Further, why has Uganda seemingly chosen to avoid careful reckoning for atrocities that occurred over the past forty years? The answers are deeply embedded in Ugandan society, in the violence that successively swept across the nation and in the politics of power, then and now.

The book review:
This is a heartfelt memoir of Cindi Brown’s eight months as a volunteer assigned to the Tropical Institute of Community Health and Development (TICH) in Kisumu, Kenya. Kenya truly was an eye opener for Ms. Brown. In mid-life she left a comfortable regime at home and signed on with Volunteers in Service Overseas (I was not aware that the organization took non-U.K. citizens) for a two-year stint in Kenya. She was assigned as a communications, public-relations specialist to TICH, an indigenous organization that is achieving great success in bringing better health to communities in western Kenya through grassroots education and organization of health workers.

 

The book review:

This is a scholarly tome that investigates individual motives behind the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Professor Fujii started with the premise that ethnic hatred, ethnic fear, or both, were key to enticing individuals to participate in the killings. Although she noted and elaborated on the facts that the overall climate that fostered genocide repeatedly stressed such themes, Ms. Fujii did not find those motivations operating at the individual level. Instead she discovered a complex web of motivations that varied from individual to individual.

The book review:

(Full title) First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria: How a Peace Corps Poster Boy Won My Heart and a Third-World Adventure Changed My Life

The title of this intriguing memoir effectively lays out the plot, but the details are worth the read. In self-deprecating and often humorous fashion, author Eve Brown-Waite recounts the late 1980s when she developed an immediate crush on John, a Peace Corps recruiter. Eve joined the Peace Corps (at least partially to prove herself worthy of him) and was posted to Ecuador. Although she curtailed early, Eve got her man. They married, then the couple accepted a posting to Arua, Uganda, where John ran a micro-credit project for CARE. They lived there, in Uganda’s troubled West Nile region for several years, began a family and interacted extensively with the local community.

The book review:

This is a novel about love and marriage; relationships and how they change over time in response to circumstances. The circumstances in this instance are provided in Kenya in the late seventies. The Kenyan setting is authentically portrayed. Ergo those who know Kenya will take added pleasure in reading the novel.

The book review:
The action in this novel unrolls in East Africa and Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is kind of an odd amalgam, but the story moves on in a satisfactory fashion and keeps the reader engaged.