Georges Simenon was a Belgian writer best known for his detective stories. He wrote literary novels, too, like this one published in 1933. It’s about a young French man, Joseph Timar, who goes to Gabon to take a position with a French company operating there. He finds himself in a world where there are three… [Read More]
Blog
Tag: Africa
Equatorial Guinea: “The Wonga Coup” by Adam Roberts
I’ve been doing this project of learning about Africa one nation at a time for about a year and a half now, and I have read a lot of academic books. In some of these small countries, the only people doing the research are those looking for more and more obscure dissertation topics. I expected to… [Read More]
Cameroon: Your Madness, Not Mine
Next up in the African series is Cameroon. It’s a former French colony that became independent in 1960 and has had a relatively stable government since then. It’s not perfect, hardly. Per-Capital GDP is $2,400 – better than many of its neighbors in West Africa, but hardly great. This is a book of short stories published in 1999 by the… [Read More]
Wild Swans and nations in transition
This is an amazing book. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China is about one family’s experience in China before and during the Communist era. The author’s parents were high up in the Communist Party at the time of the Communist Revolution, and then they suffered mightily during the Cultural Revolution. The author, Jung Chang, has… [Read More]
Cote d’Ivoire: Still Wretched
The Africa project has not gone away. I still want to learn something about every country on the continent, but it’s taking a while. It doesn’t help when I select very weighty books, either. Which brings us to Cote D’Ivoire: The Conundrum of A Still Wretched of the Earth, an academic overview of the crisis… [Read More]
