This is a short one, so I squeezed it in before 2015. John Anderton is the head of Precrime, a department that uses three idiots savants/precogs to triangulate and anticipate crimes before they’re ever committed. Thanks to Precrime, violent crime is basically nonexistent in this world. The book starts with Anderton warily assessing a new employee who he quickly suspects of conspiring for his job and the Precrime department. In just a few pages, Anderton picks up a report from the precogs that he will shortly murder someone he doesn’t know. He hides […]
The Radiance of Tomorrow…aaaannnd Cannonball!
It is the end, or maybe the beginning, of another story. Every story begins and ends with a woman, a mother, a grandmother, a girl, a child. Every story is a birth… To round out my ten African books of the year, I picked up this novel by Ishmael Beah, known for his previous non-fiction, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of A Boy Soldier. After reading this, I definitely want to pick that one up, too. This is fiction, but it’s obviously based on truth. […]
This is a story about post-colonial economic impotence–literally.
El Hadji Abdou Kader is a rich and powerful man in the emerging middle class of 1970s Senegal, who got that way through some…creative…business practices. A member of the showy “Businessman’s Group” who considers the President a close friend, he lives in post-colonial luxury: two wives, two villas, a chauffeur, etc. El Hadji decides to take a third wife, N’Gone, to the dismay of his first two wives and their children, and throws an ostentatious celebration. But things go wrong on his (third) wedding night: he has […]
A Tender Apocalypse
Station Eleven’s set up is typical for a post-apocalyptic story: worldwide epidemic (in this case, the Georgia Flu) wipes out nearly everyone (in this case, 99%) in a short amount of time (in this case, less than a week). Lucky survivors toughen up or die in the new world, quickly learning how to live without modern technology, grieving their lost loved ones–and lost comforts–and try to figure out what’s next for themselves and humanity. Babies are born, people band together, life is brutal and often short. Settlements […]
Growing Up is a Treacherous Endeavor
“A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it it has been taught to sit up or lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarms, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay. But the trick most folks are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they’ve got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don’t have one at all. It is the very […]
Memoir of the Warm Heart of Africa
This is the eighth of my 10 African books this year, and the first by a Malawian author–I couldn’t well leave Malawi off the list since moving here was what inspired me to read more African books in the first place! Samson Kambalu was born in in 1975 into a Christian family of eight, and spent most of his childhood moving among remote villages in Malawi. Kambalu tells his story in chronological anecdotes, mostly, including early memories of being plagued by parasites, poverty, malaria, jiggers and other hazards of a […]
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