SEED Suggested Reading List I. Books about Africa History and Biography The Fate of Africa - Martin Meredith • The post independence history of Sub-Saharan Africa. Spanning the entire continent, and covering the major upheavals more or less chronologically—from the promising era of independence to the most recent spate of infamies (Rwanda, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Sierra Leone)—Meredith brings us on a journey that is as illuminating as it is grueling. Meredith's history provides a gripping digest of the endemic woes confronting the cradle of humanity. • http://www.amazon.com/The-Fate-Africa-History-Independence/dp/B000WCNWKG King Leopold’s Ghost - Adam Hochschild (Congo) • In this historical account, Adam Hochschild describes King Leopold of Belgium’s takeover and cruel subjugation of the Belgian Congo from 1885-1909. The book also documents the launch of the international Congo reform movement, which developed from efforts to hold King Leopold accountable to the human rights violations he perpetrated during this period. Hochschild's draws heavily on eyewitness accounts of the colonialists' savagery, brings this little-studied episode in European and African history into new light. • http://www.amazon.com/dp/0618001905/?tag=googhydr- 20&hvadid=13265943641&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=1736528665231244984&hvpon e=10.85&hvptwo=&hvqmt=e&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_17a8squr7j_e Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela (South Africa) • Since his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela has emerged as the world's most potent moral leader since Gandhi. His pivotal role in the anti-apartheid movement led to a life underground and imprisonment for his political beliefs and activities. A triumphant sequence of events then followed which climaxed in April 1994, with the appointment of Mandela not only as the first-ever black South African president, but as the first man to govern a democratic, multi-racial South African society. This work is Mandela's own account of his and his country's epic journey. • http://www.amazon.com/Long-Walk-Freedom-Autobiography-Mandela/dp/0316548189 1 Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town - Paul Theroux • In Dark Star Safari, the wittily observant and endearingly irascible Paul Theroux takes readers the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry, and train. What results is an insightful meditation on the history, politics, and beauty of Africa and its people, and "a vivid portrayal of the secret sweetness, the hidden vitality, and the long-patient hope that lies just beneath the surface" • http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0618446877 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jarred Diamond • In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel , the author explores how climate change, the population explosion and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide? • http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Succeed-Revised-Edition/dp/0143117009 Guns Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - Jarred Diamond • In this "artful, informative, and delightful” book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion -- as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal. • http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y The Invisible Cure: Why we are losing the fight against AIDS in Africa - Helen Epstein • The Invisible Cure is an account of Africa's AIDS epidemic from the inside--a revelatory dispatch from the intersection of village life, government intervention, and international aid. Helen Epstein left her job in the US in 1993 to move to Uganda, where she began work on a test vaccine for HIV. Once there, she met patients, doctors, politicians, and aid workers, and began exploring the problem of AIDS in Africa through the lenses of medicine, politics, economics, and sociology. Amid the catastrophic failure to reverse the epidemic, she discovered a village-based solution that could prove more effective than any network of government intervention and international aid, an intuitive response that calls into question many of the fundamental assumptions about the AIDS in Africa. 2 • http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Cure-Losing-Against- Africa/dp/B0055X5M6E/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372771884&sr=1- 1&keywords=The+Invisible+Cure%3A+Why+we+are+losing+the+fight+against+AIDS+in+Africa Mountains Beyond Mountains- Tracy Kidder Pulitzer Prize—winning author Tracy Kidder tells the true story of a gifted man who loves the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it. In medical school, Paul Farmer found his life’s calling: to cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. Kidder’s magnificent account takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that “the only real nation is humanity.” At the heart of this book is the example of a life based on hope and on an understanding of the truth of the Haitian proverb “Beyond mountains there are mountains”–as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too. • http://www.amazon.com/Mountains-Beyond-Farmer-Random- Readers/dp/0812980557/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372771939&sr=1- 1&keywords=Mountains+Beyond+Mountains Strength in What Remains – Tracy Kidder Strength in What Remains is an unlikely story about an unreasonable man. Deo was a young medical student who fled the genocidal civil war in Burundi in 1994 for the uncertainty of New York City. Against absurd odds--he arrived with little money and less English and slept in Central Park while delivering groceries for starvation wages--his own ambition and a few kind New Yorkers led him to Columbia University and, beyond that, to medical school and American citizenship. That his rise followed a familiar immigrant's path to success doesn't make it any less remarkable, but what gives Deo's story its particular power is that becoming an American citizen did not erase his connection to Burundi, in either his memory or his dreams for the future. Writing with the same modest but dogged empathy that made his recent Mountains Beyond Mountains a modern classic, Tracy Kidder follows Deo back to Burundi, where he recalls the horrors of his narrow escape from the war and begins to build a medical clinic where none had been before. Deo's terrible journey makes his story a hard one to tell; his tirelessly hopeful but clear-eyed efforts make it a gripping and inspiring one to read. • http://www.amazon.com/Strength-Remains-Random-Readers- Circle/dp/0812977610/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372772024&sr=1- 1&keywords=strength+in+what+remains 3 The City of Joy – Dominique Lapierre • This is the story of living saints and heroes-- those who abandoned affluent and middle-class lives to dedicate themselves to the poor. And it is a testament to the people of the City of Joy. Their tragedies will move you, but their faith, generosity, and most of all, boundless love will lift you, bless you, and possibly change your life. • http://www.amazon.com/City-Joy-Dominique- Lapierre/dp/8176210528/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372772141&sr=1- 1&keywords=city+of+joy Fiction Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) • One of Chinua Achebe's many achievements in his acclaimed first novel, Things Fall Apart , is his relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism. First published in 1958, just two years before Nigeria declared independence from Great Britain, the book eschews the obvious temptation of depicting pre-colonial life as a kind of Eden. Instead, Achebe sketches a world in which violence, war, and suffering exist, but are balanced by a strong sense of tradition, ritual, and social coherence. • http://www.amazon.com/Things-Fall-Apart-Chinua-Achebe/dp/0385474547 Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese (Ethiopia) • Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles--and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined. • http://www.amazon.com/dp/0375714367 The Ladies No.1 Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith (Botswana) • The beloved first novel in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency seriestells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to “help people with problems in their lives.” Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, Mma Ramotswe is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter.