Respected Africa expert Martin Meredith has been on quite a roll lately. His book The Fate of Africa: A History of 50 Years of Independence represents one of the most highly regarded and extensive treatments of the continent and its difficult recent past. He recently reissued his indictment of Robert Mugabe, Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe in revised form with the new title Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe. And now he has published Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers and the Making of South Africa, an exploration of South African history in the period from 1871 to 1910, and a book almost as ambitious as The Fate of Africa. Here is Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times.
